Mentality and Freedom 



WILUAM ARMSTRONG FAIRBURN 




Class _Ki:_W 
Copight'N?_ 

COPYRIGHT DEFOSm 



MENTALITY AND 
FREEDOM 



ESSAYS 

BY 

WILLIAM ARMSTRONG FAIRBURN 




The Nation Press, Inc. 
New York 






Copyright 1917 
By William Armstrong Fairburn 



DEC 22 1917 



Oci.A481()8U 






To My Sons 
BILLY and BOBS 



Essays 



PAGE 

I 11 

II ........ 33 

III 59 

IV 77 

V 91 

VI 113 

VII 141 

VIII 155 

IX . 173 

X 187 

XI 203 

XII 219 

XIII 237 



INTRODUCTION 

IN this series of essays, the dominant motif of 
Human Potentiahty has been sounded from 
many view-points. The continual repetition 
of the fundamental theme is by no means a novel 
method in the propounding of truth. Indeed, it is 
only by repetition and reiteration through many 
aspects of the same great truths that potent convic- 
tions, demanding action, are formed. It is not 
urdike the method used by the organist improvising 
upon his theme and placing it in different settings ; 
at one time he uses the simple motif with conspicu- 
ous clearness ; at another it is only a subtle sugges- 
tion; occasionally the fundamental chord is given, 
and through it all the dominant theme vibrates true. 

The great curse that blights and enfetters hu- 
man life — ^the world's besetting sin — ^is ignorance. 
It is the ignorance of mental lethargy, of arrested 
growth and of thoughtless acquiescence in the 
tenets of external domination. This ignorance is 
evident when human minds, instead of exercising 
reason, mechanically reflect the opinions of the 
crowd, when they accept without review the creeds 
of external authority and lose themselves in dwarf- 
ing mind-habits which are deeply rutted in tradi- 
tion. Thus individuality is deadened and Godhood 
is crucified. 

The indomitable foe of autocracy is not sociaHsm 
or anarchy; it is the free, unfettered mind that 



INTRODUCTION 

thinks as an individual and acts according to innate 
wisdom. Such a mind upholds government, law 
and order, and abhors anarchy, which is but chaos; 
its ideal of government is freedom, justice and 
brotherhood. True individuality is impregnated 
with social purpose in harmony with the Cosmic 
Spirit of hfe. It demands universal education and 
the development of each according to his natural 
endowment; it stands for universal suffrage and 
equality of opportunity, with encouragement for 
all. It is the happy mean between the slavery of 
the masses by hereditary privilege or selfish au- 
thority, on the one hand, and unrestrained license 
and anarchy on the other. It is the only hope for 
the ultimate realization of enlightened, social-demo- 
cratic government and universal tolerance. 

Ignorance is a condition of undevelopment. 
Every normal child is born essentially wise, with 
an appetency for knowledge and with mental power 
in embryo peculiar to his individuality and de- 
signed for effective service in the world. The de- 
velopment and use of one's mental power is virtue ; 
the disuse and resultant atrophy of such endowed 
power is ignorance and sin. Happiness, usefulness 
and human power depend upon the development 
of one's mentahty, not upon the highly specialized 
growth and vigor of one part, but upon the all- 
round development of the whole. The world cries 
out today for thinking men and women, for com- 
plete human beings, for individuals whose lives 
reflect their peculiar inherent power, which they 
will persistently apply with social purpose in their 
journey toward the great Cosmic Goal. 



INTRODUCTION 

The brain, like the physical body, can only be 
developed through usage; as every part must be 
exercised if one would have a natural, healthy 
body, so every part of the human brain needs exer- 
cise or it will lose its vital power. A reasoning 
judicial brain will retain its plasticity; but if exter- 
nal opinions are habitually accepted as one*s own 
and are not presented to the tribunal of one's mind, 
the brain becomes a mere grooved and hardened 
substance, recording soullessly and mechanically 
the opinions of others, with the result that one's 
mental life becomes more and more submerged in 
the deep ruts of thoughtlessness and automatism. 

Man is naturally an intelligent, social and spirit- 
ual being. Education should be the process of 
development to the full realization of oneself. 
When men grow to be what they were ordained to 
be and what they have the power within themselves 
to become, the evils of the world will disappear. 
The consort of all vice and error is ignorance, while 
wisdom, truth, love and happiness are synonymous 
terms, which can only be realized through complete- 
ness. To glimpse the ideal, one must develop one's 
faculties — all of one's faculties — to the utmost. 

There is no uniformity in nature, the law of 
variability is supreme. There can, therefore, be no 
such thing as uniform crowd education. Each 
must grow in harmony with his nature to the reali- 
zation of his peculiar individuality. The work of 
the world must be performed in multifarious chan- 
nels, and legions of men with the most variable 
mental endowments are created to fittingly perform 
this diversified work. True education is not the 



INTRODUCTION 

Academical forcing of child minds into one author- 
itatively-decreed, pedagogical mold, but it is the 
growth and development to power of diversities, 
the encouragement of initiative, the fertilizing of 
differences in human endowment ; and only through 
individuality intensified by social purpose can the 
world progress. 

Never in the history of the human family were 
there more glaring facts to substantiate the need 
of the individual to realize his innate power for 
creative good. The one ray of hope for this battle- 
scarred world is universal education in the truth 
that alone can make men free. It is time that the 
world ceased to reverence the Napoleons and Alex- 
anders of history, the enemies and destroyers of 
freedom, democracy and lasting progress. Our 
children must be taught the attributes of true man- 
hood and the dimensions of real heroes. Their 
receptive minds should by truth be kept free from 
prejudice, so that they will spontaneously respond 
to the Apostles of Beauty and Love, to the world's 
sages who are the real creative builders of human 
happiness and well-being, and thus will they grow 
in harmony with the great Cosmic Plan of Evolu- 
tion toward perfection. 

The author hopes to publish during the coming 
year a separate volume of essays on this same gen- 
eral subject, dealing more directly with education 
and the mental development and freedom of the 
young. 

W. A. F. 
Great Barrington, Mass. 
October 28, 1917. 



I 

THE average man has depths of possibilities 
that are never reached, inherent capabilities 
that are never utihzed and valuable poten- 
tiahties that forever he dormant, undeveloped and 
even undiscovered in the substratum of his person- 
ality. Few, even, of our so-called successful men 
could be truthfully termed "efficient" when the ex- 
ercise of all their innate powers and their actual 
achievements are compared with the great possi- 
bilities afforded by their wonderful and often diver- 
sified mental equipment, endowed for utilization 
and service in the world. On every hand there are 
men of five talents using but one and that indiffer- 
ently or aimlessly. The human mind is composed 
of many attributes or talents that, instead of being 
brought forth for use and service, are carefully 
wrapped in napkins and are hidden away in the 
archives of cerebral obhvion. 

"He that made us with such large discourse 
Looking before and after^ gave us not 
That capability and God-like reason 
To fust in us unused." 

There is a waste in the world today far greater 
than that which can be determined by any economic 
statistics, and is infinitely more serious than the 
most reckless extravagance occasioned by man's 
prodigality of nature's materialistic resources. The 

11 



12 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

greatest waste in the world, handicapping progress 
and marring happiness, is the waste of men's minds. 
Bacon said that man is of kin to the beasts, by his 
body, and if he be not of kin to the great Cosmic 
spirit by his mind and soul, "he is a base and igno- 
ble creature." The human mind is the harp upon 
which the soul sends forth its message and its ener- 
gized vibrations to the world. How many strings 
has our harp, how many of these strings are at- 
tuned and pitched to send forth true notes and how 
many strings are being actually used as we play in 
the great Orchestra of Life? 

Man instinctively expresses those mental at- 
tributes that are exhibited by the most intelligent 
forms of lower animal life, but much of the re- 
mainder of his wonderfully created and peculiarly 
human brain, instead of functioning as a world 
force, is atrophied by an "indolent vacuity of 
thought," with the possible exception of certain 
well-worn grooves of habitual and so-called higher 
mental processes, which have been proven necessary 
for survival and his economic success in life. The 
ordinary human brain is like a vast stretch of land 
with the greater part lying fallow and uncultivated; 
that which is neglected has neither seed time nor 
harvest. Moreover, most of the dominion of the 
brain is a great uncharted country whose wealth and 
possibihties are undreamed of. Like muscles of 
the body, mental powers must be exercised if they 
are to be brought to and maintained in a state of 
healthful vigor. Thought and feehng are to the 
brain what bodily exercise is to the muscles; they 
put it into activity, stimulate the circulation of blood 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 13 

and cause an augmented elaboration of nervous 
energy. 

There is a fundamental law of nature that use 
develops and lack of use atrophies. Lamarck's 
theory of evolution, which can be absorbed in the 
larger and broader theory of natural selection, was 
based upon the principle of appetency plus the basic 
fact that use follows desire and disuse follows 
apathy or indifference; — by constant use living 
parts grow and by disuse they atrophy. This can 
be further described as the Law of Habit, — the 
function prompts the growth of the organ, and the 
development of organs and their force of action are 
constantly in ratio to the employment of these 
organs. To increase the strength and energy of 
any organ and function, it is necessary to exercise 
them regularly and judiciously according to the 
laws of their constitution. Talents utilized bring 
forth interest which compounds itself and tends to 
make the small grow to large; but talents ignored, 
corrode and disappear and men of possible great- 
ness degenerate into mediocrity solely because of 
neglect of inherent forces and the drifting into 
mental sluggishness. 

Life is thought and it is the mind alone that can 
make the body truly live. Thoughts are supreme 
and when in harmony with Cosmic truth, they syn- 
chronize with the great potent forces which rule the 
world. Strength of mind is the fruit of mental ex- 
ercise ; it is acquired by activity, not by rest. Idle- 
ness is emptiness. *'The tree in which the sap is 
stagnant, remains fruitless." 

A devastated city is a fearful sight. The ruins of 



14 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Pompeii fill one with awe, but a deserted city, preg- 
nant with possibilities and haunted with ghost-like 
memories, is a horrible monument of unmeasurable 
calamity. It is expressive of a weird desolation, 
analogous to that of a human mind neglected and 
unused, with empty homes, streets and sections 
abandoned and the whole structure in tottering 
decay. 

The mind not only has to function to acquire, but 
has to be fittingly exercised with psychological effi- 
ciency in order to retain. Locke has said, "There 
seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas ; even 
of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the 
most retentive, so that if they be not sometimes re- 
newed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflec- 
tion on those kinds of objects which at first occa- 
sioned them, the print wears out and at last there 
remains nothing to be seen." Great virtues are 
never acquired by slight endeavors, and a healthy, 
vigorous, well-developed mind can only result from 
intelligent training, unwavering purpose and diver- 
sified exercise. 

Life is evolving with hysterical speed ; our age is 
one of extreme nervous tension. Man is living un- 
der tremendous pressure and the pace of life is ter- 
rific ; its very momentum tending toward the unnat- 
ural, the superficial and the materialistic. Men 
whirl in dizziness and rush bhndly in their orbits, 
their true selves nimibed and deadened, their sense 
of proportion lost, their vision of life and reality 
blurred and out of focus. The whirl of existence 
produces not even the hysterical asceticism of the 
fanatical whirhng and howling dervish, but rather 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 15 

the empty-headedness and dizziness of an abused, 
neglected mentality in a puppet body, foolishly 
jerked about here and there in a mad endeavor to 
participate in the show of life. 

Merely to breathe, walk, eat and sleep does not 
mean that we live, and even if all our abdominal 
organs function well, such a fact is not of necessity 
indicative of robust health. Cicero fittingly said 
that "The diseases of the mind are more and more 
destructive than those of the body." Even errone- 
ous thoughts are better than none at all, for, whereas 
error enslaves, disuse and inactivity kill; there is 
always hope of freedom for the enslaved — there is 
no hope of recovery for the dead. 

The modern world is enslaved and worships at 
the shrine of externals. Men are judged and grad- 
ed not by what they are but by what they appear to 
be ; they are classified by the world, not with stand- 
ards of mind and soul, but by faulty material meas- 
ures of worldly wealth and fame. When psycho- 
logical properties are acknowledged, they are 
weighed in the scales of popular belief by the crowd, 
which is always many long years behind the genius 
and the leaders of progressive thought. Two thou- 
sand years ago Seneca expounded a fundamental 
truth when he said, "If you hve according to na- 
ture you will never be poor; if according to the 
world's caprices, you will never be rich." 

Montaigne, in one of his essays, wrote "It is mar- 
velous that we ourselves are the only things not 
esteemed for their proper qualities. We commend 
a horse for his strength and speed, not for his trap- 
pings ; a greyhoimd for his swiftness, not his collar. 



16 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Why do we not esteem a man for that which is liis 
own? He has a goodly train of followers, a stately 
palace, so much rent coming in, so much credit 
among men. Alas, all that is about him, not in him. 
If you buy a horse, you see him bare of saddle and 
clothes. When you judge a man, why consider his 
wrappings only ? In a sword it is the quality of the 
blade, not the value of the scabbard, to which you 
give heed. A man should be judged by what he is 
himself, not by his appurtenances. Let him lay 
aside his riches and external honors and show him- 
self in his shirt. Has he a sound body? What mind 
has he? Is it fair, capable and unpolluted and hap- 
pily equipped in all its parts? Is it a mind to be 
settled, equable, contented and courageous in any 
circumstances?" Epictetus said that cattle care 
only for fodder, and, in the great fair of the world, 
some men exhibit the same dwarfed and restricted 
materialistic sentiments. He classed all externals 
as mere fodder, saying, "To all of you, who busy 
yourselves about possessions and farms and domes- 
tics and public posts, these things are nothing else 
but mere fodder." The great question to be asked 
in determining the success or failure of any indi- 
vidual life is not "What did he acquire?" but "What 
did he think and what did he doV^ Or, in other 
words, "What kind of a mind did he have and how 
did he use it?" 

"Were I so tall to reach the Pole, 
Or grasp the ocean with my span, 
I must be measured by my soul: 
The mind's the standard of the man." 

Man's noblest ambition is to make the best of his 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 17 

potentialities; to bear fruit from every seedling 
implanted in the hmnan brain by Cosmic creative 
power; to neglect or abuse none; to nurture and 
utilize all. Every person is responsible for the de- 
velopment and use of all the forces within the scope 
of his inherent abihties and no one can tell whose 
sphere will prove the largest. To do the best one 
can, is a worthy motive when it is apphed to all 
one's diversified capabilities and when each deed 
is performed thoughtfully and with the full exer- 
cise of one's marvelous God-Hke mind. The state- 
ment "He does the best he can" is usually suggestive 
of failure, coupled with a belitthng explanation and 
subtle criticism. The manly part is to do with 
might and main all that is possible, — no half-heart- 
ed devotion, no drifting in the current of events and 
opinions, but determined purpose, energy, enthusi- 
asm and achievement. He who does all his circum- 
stances allow, "does well, acts nobly; angels could 
do no more." 

In our civilization of artificialities, man is prone 
to neglect his wonderful birthright, follow blindly 
the common herd and mimic the sentiments of the 
hour with parrot glibness. In this twentieth cen- 
tury, the hardest task a man can give himself is to 
think, — to exercise his mental forces honestly and 
individually with the practice of reason and logic. 
Automatons with slothful minds and dwarfed souls 
flit aimlessly across the stage of life. Many men 
endowed with wonderful gifts — philosophers, scien- 
tists, artists in embryo — carry with them but the 
caskets symbohc of their failure to utilize those 
forces for whose expression they were created. 



18 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

We are living in a self-satisfied age of dissatisfac- 
tion; as Deshouliere has said, "No one is satisfied 
with his fortune, nor dissatisfied with his intellect.'* 
Would that every living man could be awakened 
like Saul of Tarsus and see vividly that truth which 
shows absolute and relative values and the end of 
each of the pathways traversed through Hfe. The 
more superficial a man is, the more self-satisfied he 
seems to become. It is well to recall the philo- 
sophical admonition of Quarles, "Be always dis- 
pleased at what thou art, if thou desire to attain 
what thou art not ; for when thou hast pleased thy- 
self, there thou abidest." Self-satisfaction is of all 
things most unprofitable ; rather than think, record 
or boast of our own achievements, time would be 
better spent in noting faults and reckoning up de- 
fects, — a formidable task for even the most worthy. 

We are told that this is the age of the specialist, 
but is this any legitimate argument why a man of 
five talents should use only one? A specialist with 
one narrow line of thought may contribute to the 
world's knowledge and advancement, but a man of 
concentrated mentahty, feeding and developing his 
mind through the exercise of all phases of his psy- 
chological endowment, is a far more potent speciahst 
in the line on which he chooses to concentrate his 
efforts, for his vision is of wide as well as deep focus 
and he sees not only the line, but the field that is 
more or less allied with it and the forces that con- 
verge into or radiate from it. A man with a great 
predominating talent is made greater and his use- 
fulness to the world is vastly intensified as he de- 
velops to the utmost not only the one great lumi- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 19 

nous, conspicuous talent, but all his lesser, innate 
faculties and mental forces. Such all-round devel- 
opment makes a true genius of a crank and a world's 
leader out of an otherwise despised fanatic. 

**Every thought," wrote Emerson, "which genius 
and piety throw into the world, alters the world," 
and Carlyle said, "In every epoch of the world, the 
great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival 
of a Thinker in the world?" The average man drifts 
into a hne of work which makes peculiar and, at the 
same time, restricted demands upon him. He earns 
a competence, functions to make a believedly fitting 
return for the emolimient received, gravitates into a 
"position," settles into habitual Unes of thought, be- 
gins to operate with the subconscious mind as an 
automaton and meets unusual conditions with a 
mind becoming less and less exercised, and, there- 
fore, less and less vital and efficient. He is soon 
lulled into somnolence and as a mental force in the 
world, dies prematurely without contributing much, 
if anything, to the world's progress. Epictetus 
likens such a man to a traveler "who returning into 
his country and meeting on the way with a good 
Inn, should remain there. 'Have you forgotten your 
intentions, man? You were not traveling to this 
place, but only through it.' 'But this is a fine place.' 
*And how many other fine Inns are there and how 
many pleasant fields, yet they are simply as a means 
of passage.' " There are many men who stop just 
as this traveler did at the first seemingly good Inn; 
they "go no farther, but sit down and waste their 
lives shamefully there as if among the sirens." 

A waste of purpose, motive and direction in life is 



20 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

what makes existence on this planet so uninterest- 
ing, dreary and monotonous ; and yet this very psy- 
chological attitude courts monotony and this nega- 
tive theory of life, or, shall we say, lack of any 
theory and sane reasoning, attracts gloom and en- 
velops the soul in a deadening pall of despair. A 
man may gain riches and power, be hailed as suc- 
cessful and yet be an automaton, a mere machine 
with money-making or power-grasping character- 
istics and with a mind woefully neglected and the 
nobler qualities and possibilities atrophied. Is there 
any comparison between the mental or spiritual life 
of man, on the one hand, and his materiahstic, sen- 
suous and animal existence on the other? 

"Better to fail in the high aim than 
Vulgarly in the low aim succeed." 

The human brain is like an apartment with many 
rooms. Some men live in one or two rooms of their 
brain, and seldom use or even enter other equally 
attractive and important rooms. Many men are 
mere warehouses with every available cubic inch of 
their personality stuffed with merchandise and 
worldly goods, with a price-tag attached. Beecher, 
describing this class said, "There are apartments in 
their souls which were once tenanted by taste and 
love and joy and worship, but they are all deserted 
now and the rooms are filled with earthy and ma- 
terial things." And again he said, "Many men 
build in life as cathedrals have been built ; the part 
nearest the ground seems finished but those parts 
which soar toward heaven, the turrets and the spires, 
lie forever incomplete." Fuller expressed the same 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 21 

thought when he said, "Often the cock-loft is empty 
in those whom nature hath built many stories high." 
The human brain might be likened to a three- 
story house with basement in the rear. The biolog- 
ical evolution of man has progressed in a manner 
analogous to the building of a house and during 
man's ascent from the lower animals, two stories 
have been added to the original lower floor and base- 
ment. The cellar occupied in the rear is known as 
the cerebellum and science tells us that this part of 
the brain is primitive, brutish and sensual. The 
first floor or stratum of the brain performs func- 
tions in common with the higher forms of animal Hf e 
and can be fittingly designated as "animal" with 
its keen physical senses and its avarice, aggression, 
love of life, self-preservation and combativeness. 
The next floor, built through the ages as man by 
evolution became more and more a thinking and 
reasoning creature, can be termed the "human" or 
"material" stratum of the brain and it appears to 
house the meditative and critical faculties. The 
top floor, existing to some extent in all men, is the 
"ethical" stratum and this part of the brain has been 
created to naturally and fittingly house those psy- 
chological properties which have raised men above 
all other forms of life. On this floor are spaces 
designed to fittingly accommodate and nurture mo- 
rality, ethics, reverence, ideals, sympathies, benevo- 
lence, conscientiousness, aspirations, honor, justice, 
constancy and consistency. Many men, presented 
by nature with a three-story house to use and live in, 
refuse to spend any time up stairs and seldom visit 
the upper floor. 



22 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Each floor of the house created to contain the 
brain is divided into rooms and there are front rooms 
and rear rooms. Scientists tell us that the room of 
Domesticity, like the kitchen of the average home, is 
in the rear ; and the distinctive intellectual faculties 
are in the front. As man has by evolution advanced 
farther and farther from the lower animals, the fore 
part of his brain has developed as well as the crown 
or upper part. There are old-fashioned and simple 
people hving in homes containing only a kitchen 
and a parlor, or, as the Scotch named them, "But" 
and "Ben," who keep the front and best room in the 
house closed up, using it only on Sundays and in 
extreme cases for parties, funerals and weddings. 
The frontal brain room is often used in a similar 
manner and wonderful, innate, intellectual faculties 
He unused, inert^ — dead. 

Epictetus has said that man is a rational being, 
distinguished from wild and domesticated animals 
by mind and reasoning faculties. "Take care, then, 
to do nothing like a wild beast, otherwise you have 
destroyed the man ; you have not fulfilled what your 
nature promises. Take care, too, to do nothing hke 
cattle; for thus likewise the man is destroyed. 
When we act gluttonously, lewdly, rashly, sor- 
didly, inconsiderately, into what are we sunk? Into 
cattle. What have we destroyed? The rational be- 
ing. When we behave contentiously, injuriously, 
passionately and violently, into what have we sunk? 
Into wild beasts. And further, some of us are wild 
beasts of a larger size ; others Httle mischievous ver- 
min. By means of this animal kindred, some of us, 
deviating toward it, become like wolves, faithless 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 23 

and crafty; others like lions, wild, savage and un- 
tamed; but most of us like foxes, disgraceful even 
among brutes. For what else is a slanderous and ill- 
natured man but a fox or something yet more 
wretched and mean?" 

The brain is Hke a library with sections referring 
to different prime classifications of subjects and 
each section with its shelves and nimierous volimies. 
How many men spend their lives perusing the books 
on only one shelf or in one section, thus making it 
impossible to hve well-rounded lives! Reading is 
the great channel by which one can gain knowledge, 
broaden the vision and stimulate thought. Books 
have been written deahng with every field of human 
knowledge, research and endeavor, and a modern, 
well-stocked library has shelves Hberally suppHed 
with such books. "All that mankind has done, 
thought, gained or been, is lying in magic preserva- 
tion in the pages of books. The true University of 
these days is a collection of books" (Carlyle) . The 
human brain, like a modern library, should be the 
circulating abode of diversified knowledge with 
great breadth and depth of multiform interests and 
each well-rounded personality will see that the brain 
shelves of knowledge are not empty nor the books 
once placed therein dusty and disfigured with the 
cobwebs of disuse. 

The average man refuses not only to think but 
also to read, i. e., to read such books as are worth 
while, that stimulate thought, awaken dormant fac- 
ulties and spur onward to activity. "That book is 
good which puts me in a working mood." The 
perusal of newspapers, light novels and "kill time" 



24 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

printed matter is not reading. A few minutes each 
day on current news is time well spent and neces- 
sary for one's development, but as a nation we are 
great time wasters in the reading of our newspapers, 
magazines and those "best sellers" whose relation 
to literature is what sensuous ragtime is to music. 
To read worth-while, thought-stimulating and ac- 
tion-provoking matter requires some effort, concen- 
tration and a little practice, but not one person in a 
hundred, even of those capable of digesting intel- 
lectual food, is willing to submit to dietetic rules 
and develop his mind to receive, retain and profit by 
real literature. 

We would not give a Kindergarten child calculus 
to study as a first lesson in mathematics, but would 
commence his instruction with simple additions and 
subtractions, to be followed later by multiplication 
and division, until after years of concentrated effort 
and persistent application, the difficulties of integral 
and differential calculus might be attacked with 
good prospects of being mastered. Similar judg- 
ment should be displayed in reading and in the 
choice of books, but all reading may be educational 
and, therefore, profitable. Epictetus most fittingly 
said, "Some who can scarce digest a crumb, will yet 
buy and swallow whole treatises ; and so they throw 
them up again or cannot digest them ; and then come 
colics, fluxes and fevers. Such persons ought to 
consider what they can bear. No great thing is 
created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes 
or figs. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I an- 
swer you, that there must be time. Let it first blos- 
som, then bear fruit, then ripen. Since, then, the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 25 

fruit of a fig tree is not brought to perfection sud- 
denly or in an hour, do you think to possess instan- 
taneously and easily the fruit of the human mind? 
I warn you, expect it not." 

Books are storehouses of knowledge and reser- 
voirs of wisdom. They are the record of the thought, 
research and intuitions of the past. If impregnated 
with truth they live forever, defying time. The 
classics of the ancients are fountains of learning 
and philosophic wisdom, spreading eternal truth 
and freedom in a world prone to drift to error and 
slavery; they stimulate thought, invigorate the will 
and encourage the exercise of reason and logic as 
much today as they did thousands of years ago. An 
ancient Sage said that even in his day, what the 
world needed were men to apply the eternal prin- 
ciples found in books — ^men whose actions would 
bear indisputable testimony to their acceptance of 
truth. 

Reading and study are to the mind what exercise 
is to the body, and both the quality and the nature of 
the movements and the time or duration factor are 
essential to success. Mental as well as physical 
health is preserved, strengthened and invigorated 
by intelligent exercise and utilization of faculties. 
"Shall I show you the muscular training of a philos- 
opher?" asked Epictetus. "It is a wiU undisap- 
pointed, evils avoided, powers duly exerted, careful 
resolution, unerring decisions." The beginning of 
philosophy is a desire for education and mental de- 
velopment and a consciousness of our own weakness, 
inability, neglected faculties and stunted growth. 
The true purpose of education is to develop to the 



26 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

fullest extent the capabilities of every kind with 
which we are endowed. The more mental food we 
assimilate, the more conspicuous and discouraging 
our ignorance appears. Education alone can con- 
duct us to that broad and satisfying enjoyment of 
life which can only be realized by the efficient utihza- 
tion of faculties expended in true service. Plato 
said that "It is better to be unborn than untaught; 
for ignorance is the root of misfortune." It is sur- 
prising that ignorance seems with diabolical per- 
verseness to cohabit with conceit, most often ex- 
pressed to the world as vanity, arrogance and selfish 
pride. Ignorance is darkness, oblivion and the 
phantom of mental death. The "devil" in the world, 
the cause of war, discord, disease, poverty, inhuman- 
ity and all evil is ignorance. It is the negative of 
truth and stalks abroad a frightful, soulless spectre, 
fed by selfishness and clothed in egoism; its motive 
is avarice, its religion is superstition and in its wake 
are suffering and death. 

In the discourses of Epictetus we read, "Every 
habit and faculty is preserved and increased by cor- 
respondent actions ; as the habit of walking, by walk- 
ing; of running, by running. If you would be a 
reader, read; if a writer, write. After sitting still 
for ten days, get up and attempt to take a long walk 
and you will find how your legs are weakened. 
Upon the whole, then, whatever you would make 
habitual, practice it — all things are preserved and 
improved by exercising their proper functions." 
Man seems to revel in escaping mental stimuli, in 
avoiding intellectual exercise and in dodging those 
issues which would tend to develop his neglected, 



MEXTALITY AND FREEDOM 27 

innate mental forces. There are men wallowing in 
the obstinacy of ignorance, who boast of their 
strength of mind, whereas in truth their reasoning 
faculties are paralyzed. "We all dread a bodily 
paralysis and would make use of every contrivance 
to avoid it ; but none of us is troubled about a paral- 
ysis of the mind." We speak of men of one idea; 
generally tfiey are men with one predominating hal- 
lucination, with what Crothers describes as "Too- 
muchness in one direction and not-enoughness in 
another," but even such men are better than the 
great majority of mankind who are void of individ- 
ualistic ideas, have no strictly personal thought and 
who are incapable of an original conclusion or men- 
tal initiative of any kind on any subject. 

Man's great task is to subordinate externals to the 
true inner man, to become free from enslaving, sor- 
did materialism and be emancipated from those en- 
fettering, soulless conventions which are but empty 
forms void of reason and logical purpose; to exer- 
cise and perfect the will and render it conformable 
to nature — noble, free, unrestrained, unhindered, 
faithful, humble. Thus would a hfe become a posi- 
tive dynamic, harmonious force for world service 
and in such a life there would be no room for lamen- 
tation, despair, error and the worship of externals 
or false gods. 

"What dazzles, for the moment spends its spirit; 
What's genuine, shall posterity inherit." 

— Goethe. 

The cry of the hour is for thinkers, for men who 
will exercise reason and logic, be analytical, sincere 
in self-examination and studious with purpose. 



28 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

The well developed man who exercises all the 
compartments of his brain, no matter what his sta- 
tion in life may be, is a man of broad hmnan sympa- 
thies, — reachable and feelable. Such a man has a 
heart susceptible of pity and a mind cultured and 
capable of sober thought. The executive, with part 
of his brain over-developed and part atrophied 
through lack of use, cannot be just and humane in 
all his relations with men, no matter what his incli- 
nations may be. What such a leader of men cannot 
understand, he cannot weigh, and the same thought 
is applicable to workmen in every plane of life. 
"Minds that have nothing to confer, find Httle to 
perceive." Restriction of vision with egoism, the 
fruit which springs from lack of general mental de- 
velopment, is the cause of labor disputes on the part 
of both employers and employees and in the ma- 
jority of cases both are equally to blame. It is well 
to recall the thought expressed by Voltaire that they 
who are not just are severe and they who are not 
wise, become sad. 

The true education of workers and executives — 
learning with thought — ^is the only channel through 
which the world will obtain industrial peace and that 
efficiency which wiU react to the benefit of all. 

"Learning without thought is labor lost; 
Thought without learning is perilous." 

— Confucius. 

Politics and selfish ignorance will continue to un- 
settle the relation between employer and employee 
until the mental development of the masses reaches 
the plane where the majority of men see things in 
their true proportions. Government will ultimately 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 29 

exist for the true and lasting benefit of the governed 
and each individual and interest will receive just 
protection and not the abuse and neglect so often 
experienced today. It takes a long time for the 
world to learn that what hurts one is apt to hurt all, 
and unreasonable wages — high or low — ^unreason- 
able returns from a legitimate industrial or com- 
mercial investment — high or low — a false economic 
or political system and inordinate, unnecessary 
power vested in a few individuals, as well as class 
privileges or any violation of absolute justice and 
rightness, react to the detriment of the state and of 
its citizens. 

The world abounds with men who bemoan their 
blocked avenues of progress, but these are the men 
who have never striven to improve their opportuni- 
ties and fit themselves for more important duties. 
The man at the bench who never reads, studies or 
thinks, remains at the bench. The foreman suppos- 
edly skilled in certain arts, who continues day after 
day supervising the doing of the same things in the 
same way and never studying or striving to improve 
processes or the efficiency of operations, will not re- 
tain his foremanship indefinitely; he drifts back 
after many years to the ranks — a self -condemned 
victim of the law of progress and the survival of the 
fittest. The manager in command of any operation 
or phase of work, who rests on his oars, is self-satis- 
fied, indolently indifferent to progress and ceases to 
strive for knowledge and a place in the van of pro- 
gressive thought, must, in turn, yield to the thinker 
and worker who uses his brain, exercises his mental 
faculties and who, in his climbing, is never content 



30 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

with any rung which his feet reach in the ladder of 
achievement, but always sees ahead the fields of pos- 
sibility urging him forward to exploration and still 
further successes. No matter how faithful and zeal- 
ous a man may be in his work, unless he is putting 
his mind fully into his work and utilizing a reason- 
able proportion of his few hours of spare time to 
improve and develop himself, and thus endeavoring 
to make the most of his inherent endowment, he is 
not a valuable man to an organization. 

Education is the great uplifting force of the 
world. Mental development will remove all barriers 
between classes ; many of the poorest boys are hon- 
ored with the custodianship of the greatest brains 
in embryo, and will become leaders in the world's 
progress if they will but develop their potentialities. 
A man from his eyes down is worth, as a physical 
machine to perform work, $1.50 to $2.00 per day, 
but in the mart of labor from his eyes up his worth 
is immeasurable and, to a great extent, it is what he 
sees fit to make it. Many a man of one or two tal- 
ents and with a well exercised brain will outstrip, 
in the race of life, men of five or ten talents, who 
either are not cognizant of their innate possibilities 
or have taken no steps to develop them. We have 
heard that man is only 50 per cent, efficient because 
of physical impairment, but we would all be stag- 
gered if we could see vividly and graphically por- 
trayed on a chart our psychological efficiency, — our 
original endowment expressed in possibilities, com- 
pared with our actually realized or utilized mental 
powers. 

It is about time for us to get away from the old- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 31 

fashioned and mistaken notion that our education 
was completed when we left school. It had barely 
commenced. School should train one to learn, but 
true education comes as life advances and never 
ceases while life lasts. The world may despise and 
reject for a time, but it ultimately does homage to 
the man of mind and soulj to the man with well de- 
veloped intellect who mentally is neither standing 
still nor drifting back, but who, battling and strug- 
gling against the current, uses his strength and time 
to make the most of himself, achieve some praise- 
worthy thing, no matter how Httle, in the battle of 
life and assist in the advance of the world one notch 
nearer the great goal of Cosmic perfection. 

**Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, 
But in ourselves are triumphs and defeat." 

— Longfellow. 



II 

IN all animal life there is a close correspondence 
between the degree of development of any or- 
gan or part of the physical structure and its 
functional power or activity. Size is generally an 
index of strength, provided we are dealing with 
similar materials under similar conditions ; when the 
substances compared are the same and the quality 
of organism is uniform, size becomes an absolute 
measure of power. We cannot compare pine wood 
with cast iron, or cast iron with highly tempered 
steel, and in engineering work, even when specifying 
steel to fulfil a certain duty, we state its required 
ultimate tensile strength, elastic limit, ductility, gen- 
eral physical and, at times, chemical properties. We 
expect to find a blacksmith with a big arm, a wrest- 
ler with heavy shoulders, just as we may infer that 
the cranial capacity of man varies with his intellec- 
tual power. 

When we compare the brains of different birds 
and quadrupeds, we find that mental activity is 
evidenced in proportion to the size of the brain con- 
sidered in relation to the size of the body. Anthro- 
pologists tell us that a fox and a ground-hog have 
bodies of almost equal size but that the fox has a 
brain four times heavier than that of the ground- 
hog. A turkey's brain is one-third less in size than 
that of a crow whose body is not one-fourth as large ; 

33 



34 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

the stupidity of the former and the sagacity of the 
latter are proverbial. An eagle with one-half the 
body size of the goose has twice the brain capacity. 
Man has a brain very similar in form and appear- 
ance to that of the great anthropoid ape, but the 
brain of man is three or four times as large and con- 
sidering the body weight, man has five times the 
relative brain capacity of his nearest relative in the 
animal kingdom. The horse, with nine times the 
weight of man, has one- quarter his cerebral cavity 
volume; and although the elephant and the whale 
have brains much larger than man, they stand far 
below him in intelligence. This fact is explained 
when the relation of brain size to body is considered, 
the ratio being about 1 to 37 in man, 1 to 500 in the 
elephant and 1 to 3000 in the whale. 

Intellectual capacity in the lower animals appears 
to depend mainly upon the size of the cerebral cav- 
ity. Animals with larger brains and higher intelli- 
gence have supplanted those of a lower order and 
have been supplanted in turn, in harmony with the 
law of evolution, by still larger brained animals. 
The gigantic reptiles of the Secondary Period were 
gradually overcome and vanquished by the mam- 
mals of the Tertiary Period, and today man, the 
largest brained animal created, stands at the head of 
all animated nature, the undisputed peer of all 
forms of animal life. Research conducted with hu- 
man skulls found in geologic strata indicates that 
from period to period as man has developed, his 
brain capacity has increased and the earliest found 
human cranium much resembles that of the highest 
order of anthropoid ape. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 35 

Whereas the relation of cranial capacity or brain 
weight to body weight is an index of expressed intel- 
ligence in the lower animals, it cannot be so con- 
sidered, except as coupled with other important 
factors, in determining the relative intelligence of 
man. Brain volume may be an index of inherited 
mental capabilities but it gives no data concerning 
how much of the endowed power is being used. 
Moreover, it ignores the important factor of quality 
of organization. A relatively small brain of superior 
structure may accomplish more creditable work and 
manifest greater talents than a large brain lacking 
such advantages; and a small brain efficiently util- 
ized, exercised and developed may have power far 
beyond that reahzed by a massive brain, sluggishly 
and indifferently used. 

In many men of great intellectual eminence the 
brain weight has been very large, but quite undis- 
tinguished people have also had large brains. Rus- 
tan, an unknown, uneducated laborer, is reported 
to have had the largest brain on record. He prob- 
ably had innate capabihties which, if developed, 
would have made him a great intellectual power 
even if the texture of the man was coarse and the 
quality of the organism low. It is not so much a 
question of how much brain capacity a man has, but 
how much he uses. All normal, healthy men have 
sufficient brain capacity to become factors in the 
world's progress, if the brain bequeathed to them 
by Mother Nature is developed and used. When 
size and weight are considered, the most ignorant 
races of men are not far below the Caucasian Race 
in brain capacity, and when given an opportunity 



36 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

to acquire knowledge in a stimulating environment, 
the children of the lower human races have in late 
years been equalling and in Australasia have been 
outstripping the children of the white race, not- 
withstanding their handicap of quality of organiza- 
tion — the result of hereditary civihzation. 

Every man is born with certain inherent brain 
capabilities and general tendencies, texture and or- 
ganization. The use or disuse of the endowed ca- 
pacity or the differentiation of innate brain forces, 
the development or neglect of certain topographical 
brain areas and the tempering of his psychical mat- 
ter, determine his efficiency and power in the world 
as a thinking being, created to perform intelligent 
work in the universal flux, ever moving progres- 
sively toward perfection. 

Cold northern climates, the home of the aggres- 
sive and world-conquering blond Caucasians, have 
produced the largest brains. This is due to the fact 
that in the Northland, men have had to use their 
brains to live, to find food, to build homes and pro- 
tect themselves from the elements. They have had 
to fight intelligently and with initiative and aggres- 
sion, in order to survive, whereas the stimuh of the 
Tropics on the darker skinned man have been less 
acute and the demands less exacting. 

It has been argued that the size of a man's brain 
can be no index of intelligence, for many insane per- 
sons have had very large brains. Lunacy may come 
from over-stimulation of some part of the brain or 
violation of the fundamental laws of mental hygiene. 
A great mathematician lost his mind through sense- 
less concentration without relaxation or change of 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 37 

thought. A great memorizer of facts collapsed men- 
tally, due to inordinate packing of ridiculous statis- 
tics into certain mental shelves, when all the other 
sections of his mental library were lying neglected 
and unused. Genius, it has been said, is not without 
a touch of madness, and the term "Eccentricity of 
Genius" is often used in reference to the actions of 
one who has certain mental faculties unusually de- 
veloped to the possible detriment of others. 

A brain must be uniformly developed in so far as 
the stress of life and economic considerations will 
permit. Insanity may be caused by the excessive 
keying-up and snapping of one string, by the un- 
reasonable and unstandable pressure or tension on 
one member. Large brained persons are more apt 
to be guilty of over- development of any one faculty 
in this era of specialization, than are people with 
small brains. Microcephalic idiots have, however, 
very small brains, weighing in some recorded in- 
stances as low as 10 or even 8^^ ounces. Scientists 
tell us that it is extremely doubtful whether normal 
intelligence, such as is expected in a human being, 
is possible with a brain weighing less than 32 
ounces, — the average weight of a normal man's 
brain being 48 to 50 ounces. In making this state- 
ment, anthropologists admit that brain size must be 
more or less an index of mental capacity or capabili- 
ties, and it seems to have been well demonstrated 
that when brain substance exists in a normal condi- 
tion and is developed by use, intellectual phenomena 
are manifested with vigor proportionate to the 
amount of matter existing, the quality of the 



38 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

thought or brain effort varying with the fineness of 
texture and quality of the nervous organization. 

In making comparisons of brain weights, the cere- 
brum, or main brain, should be primarily considered, 
but the practice has always been to weigh and meas- 
ure the whole mass contained in the cavity of the 
skull, cerebrum, cerebellum and basilar ganglia. By 
this method of comparison an equal value is given 
to all brain matter without regard to its character or 
function; for comparison of psychical powers, such 
a method is obviously inaccurate. The quality 
of a brain, as well as the quantity, is of prime im- 
portance and we should not consider as of equal 
value, heavy but crude and cormnon merchandise 
stored in the basement or even on the first floor, with 
the lighter but more highly prized and rarer sub- 
stances stored on the higher floors. 

The human cranium is like the structure of a 
warehouse. Some storehouses are filled to the ut- 
most capacity with merchandise of more or less com- 
mercial value. At times, material in storage degen- 
erates or decays and becomes valueless; at other 
times, commodities in storage, once of some value, 
because of market conditions and the working of 
the law of supply and demand, become of such low 
realizing value that it does not pay the owner to 
keep them stored any longer. In some warehouses 
substances may be stored unchanged year after 
year; they are not used and the materials are not 
placed in circulation ; expenses are paid, rental and 
fixed charges are met and the owner becomes a 
heavy loser because of his failure to realize the bene- 
fits which would have accrued to him had he, at the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 39 

proper time and when conditions warranted, placed 
these goods where they would be used to supply a 
legitimate demand. 

What is the condition of our mental storehouse? 
The law of life demands that the warehouse be filled, 
but with what materials ? What is the value of the 
commodity stored and is it degenerating or being 
taken out of circulation? Is our brain warehouse 
kept in active use with valuable commodities, daily 
taken in and after recoopering and arranging to 
supply a definite demand, being again sent out into 
the world to perform useful and fitting service? It 
would be interesting to estimate at what value a 
skilled, experienced assessor would report the worth 
of our cranial warehouse and its contents. 

The brain of man is constituted for the most part, 
of two substances of vastly different character. 
There is (1) the cortical gray matter, made up 
chiefly of cells, and ( 2 ) the fibrous or white matter, 
firm, inelastic and tubular. The gray matter is the 
part that has a special relation to mental hf e and in 
it lies the source of nervous power. It is the ulti- 
mate seat of all processes connected with sensation 
and thought and forms on the surface of the brain 
sinuous folds called cerebral convolutions. Physi- 
ologists are generally agreed that the greater the 
surface of the cortex and, therefore, the more com- 
plex and frequent the convolutions and the larger 
the extent of brain surface, the greater becomes the 
seat of mental power, the quahty of organism re- 
maining constant. 

The convolutions of gray matter are most numer- 
ous in the brain of an intelligent man and they ap- 



40 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

parently become less pronounced as we descend the 
scale of human mental forces and less and less 
marked as we consider the higher and lower animals 
until, in the most inferior orders, they disappear. 
The brains of weak-minded persons and idiots pre- 
sent very simple convolutions and, therefore, possess 
but a relatively small amount of gray matter, where- 
as the brains of distinguished scholars and men who 
have been in the van of world progress exhibit 
great complexity of certain convolutions of gray 
matter. Huxley said, "It is only in minor charac- 
teristics that the chimpanzee's or the orang's brain 
can be structurally distinguished from man's." The 
"minor" characteristics referred to by Huxley are 
apparently the convolutions of gray matter, for the 
anthropoid apes have brains which present simple 
convolutions, a sort of simplified diagram of the 
human brain, and such a brain resembles very closely 
that of a human idiot. Difference in quality of or- 
ganization, plasticity and total relative area are also 
important factors which should be considered in 
comparing the brain of an anthropoid ape with that 
of a man. 

Turner, the anatomist, has said that the convolu- 
tions of the sensory and motor centers of the brain 
do not present any great difference in the brain of a 
child, monkey, bushman and a European man of 
science ; what differentiates these brains is the degree 
of complexity of the convolutions concerned with 
association. 

Apparently it is not the total weight of the brain, 
but really the weight of the cortical layer of gray 
matter which should be compared if one is to intel- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 41 

ligently judge of the amount of substance within 
the cranium devoted to the psychic functions; and 
as the thickness of the gray layer of matter is ap- 
proximately the same in all brains, it is evident that 
complexity in the structure of convolutions corre- 
sponds to an increase of gray matter and conse- 
quently of mental force. It is also said that brain 
cells are found in masses, chiefly in convolutions, — 
a fact which points at their relation to the conscious 
life of man. 

The brain is the seat of thought, of feeling and of 
consciousness. It is the center toward which all im- 
pressions made on the nerves distributed throughout 
the body are converged and from which the com- 
mands of the will are transmitted to put the various 
parts in motion. There is a part of the brain, to- 
gether with a highly organized nervous mass, lo- 
cated as sub-stations elsewhere in the body, which 
controls the organ functions, such as are evidenced 
in the circulatory, respiratory and digestive systems, 
the continual and efficient operation of which is 
essential to the continuance of life. 

It was indeed a wise Providence that, putting the 
himian will in general charge of the brain, decreed, 
that it should not have absolute control over certain 
parts of the brain and nervous system, on the main- 
tained and efficient use of which depends not only 
physical well-being but physical existence. If man 
had control of his entire brain plant, i. e., the central 
power house, and all sub-stations, even if he had the 
power to delegate certain duties to the sub-conscious 
brain during the hours that he devoted to recupera- 
tive sleep, human life would be very short and physi- 



42 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

cal maturity never realized. If the average man, in 
the prime of Hfe, were given this absolute control 
over all parts of his brain, nerve cells and body, and 
if he treated all his brain and nervous matter as he 
does that part over which the human wiU has abso- 
lute control, his demise would very quickly follow 
his assumption of power and authority. 

The gray matter of the brain is the organ or the 
definite seat of the mind ; different parts of this gray 
matter manifest different faculties and the power of 
manifestation in regard to each is proportionate to 
the size and activity of that part devoted to the per- 
formance of the peculiar mental functions and the 
quality and texture of the organism. The brain 
was created to be used regularly and powerfully 
and it therefore receives an unusually large supply 
of invigorating blood from the circulatory system 
in comparison with the remainder of the body. It is 
also usually a highly organized mechanism of strict- 
ly specialized parts. 

Modern research has proved conclusively what 
popular, analytical observers have long believed, 
viz., that each part of the brain is devoted to a cer- 
tain mental process, peculiar to itself, — cerebral 
localization. W. Hanna Thomson has said that ex- 
perience has definitely and conclusively proved that 
if one particular area of the gray matter be de- 
stroyed, sight is totally lost, though the eye itself in 
all its parts, with the nervous tract leading there- 
from, be wholly intact. If another particular cor- 
tical area is similarly injured, hearing is abolished, 
even though the ear with all its apparatus be unin- 
jured. The consciousness of sight or of hearing is 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 43 

not in the eye or ear, respectively, for these are mere 
instruments connected with special localities in the 
brain. Without the eye there would be no physical 
sight, and without the ear there would be no physi- 
cal hearing, yet it has been truly said that the eye 
is no more the seat or source of sight than is the tele- 
scope or microscope. "There can be no question 
that upon the integrity of gray matter depends the 
integrity of all mental processes, for these can be 
proportionately perverted by anything which inter- 
feres with the physical conditions of the gray tissue 
or by agents which derange its working. Thus me- 
chanical injuries of the brain in man often have 
been followed by peculiar mental disorder, some- 
times including change in disposition or in moral 
character." 

To still further prove cerebral localization. Prof. 
Hinshelwood of Glasgow University tells of a high- 
ly educated man suddenly afflicted with word blind- 
ness. This man could not read his native English 
but as he had been proficient in Greek, Latin and 
French he was tested on all and it was found that 
he could read Greek perfectly, Latin he handled far 
better than English, but not as well as Greek, 
whereas, in French he was very imperfect although 
he could read it with difficulty. In this case, the 
brain matter had been injured in the localized Eng- 
lish word sight section and the injury had somewhat 
damaged the French section, the Latin less and the 
Greek not at all. 

Hinshelwood also reports the case of a French- 
man living in Glasgow. After a stroke of apoplexy 
he became word-deaf in regard to French, whereas 



U MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

the English "word-hearing" part of his brain was 
unaffected; it was necessary after his brain in jury- 
to speak to him entirely in English. Thomson tells 
of a patient at Bellevue Hospital who lost the power 
of speech by the point of an umbrella entering one 
of his eyes, the accident ruining the speech center 
which rests on only a thin plate in the bony roof of 
the orbit; no other faculties were impaired. There 
is a small patch of gray matter, which Rosenstein 
says is not larger than a hazel nut, in which is stored 
every word that can be spoken. "Let this remark- 
able piece of matter be separately destroyed, such as 
by a gush of blood from a ruptured artery, and the 
consciousness is utterly unable to find a word with 
which to express itself. It still may have its power 
to receive all words from others through the ear or 
eye, but not a word can it communicate in return.'* 

Prof. Edgren of Stockholm has published the 
records of persons who became music-note blind; 
through brain injury they lost the power of reading 
music but not the faculty of word-reading. Through 
some small localized brain defect, connoisseurs of 
music have been afflicted with "amusic" and could no 
longer recognize one theme from another or discrim- 
inate between the immortal master-pieces of Wag- 
ner and sensuous rag-time. A large number of cases 
could be cited showing how local brain derangement 
causes the loss of certain peculiar mental faculties 
or change in the individual disposition, character 
and attributes. 

The seat of all mental processes being in the gray 
matter which envelops the brain and which con- 
sists of a continuous layer whose average thickness 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 45 

is only from l/l2 to 1/8 of an inch, it has been argued 
that cranial capacity and brain size or weight can- 
not be considered as an index of intelUgence or men- 
tal power. If a cube has each side increased one- 
quarter, the volume is increased 95 per cent, and the 
superficial enveloping area is increased over 56 per 
cent. If each side of the original cube is increased 
one-half, the volume becomes 3% times greater and 
the surface area 2^4 times larger. The superficial 
area is, therefore, very materially increased as the 
internal volimie is enlarged, and increase of brain 
volume carries with it a proportionate increase of 
brain surface, even if, as in the case of the most 
primitive animals, the order of increase is in one case 
as the third power, and in the other as the second. 
The surface of the human brain, however, is not 
smooth. This fact does not affect the argument 
that volume is an index of possible brain power but 
intensifies it, for in a box of given size a certain 
quantity of cloth could be folded up and stored, 
whereas in a larger box an increased quantity could 
be placed, and in this case the increased quantity, if 
the box is filled, would vary as the cubical contents 
of the box and not as the superficial area. There- 
fore, the more highly complex the convolutions of 
the human brain become, the more nearly does the 
extent and quantity of gray matter bear some defi- 
nite relation to cranial capacity. 

Men vary very materially in their mental endow- 
ment. No two men have similar brains as regards 
size, proportion, quality of nerve matter, etc., but 
every normal man is endowed with ample gray mat- 
ter to develop into individual mental power of merit 



46 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

and Cosmic use, if he so wills it. Thomson, in 
"Brain and Personality," says that "while it is 
doubtless true that all individuals of our race are 
not born with equally good brains, yet the fact re- 
mains that the special mental capabihties for which 
certain men have become so eminent, were all ac- 
quired and were not congenital. Hence, the ut- 
most which can be conceded is that the greater apti- 
tude for acquiring may be congenital but nothing 
more." Thomson is partly right. Brain folds be- 
come more complex as Mfe advances and as one ac- 
quires knowledge, but brains and certain parts of 
brains vary in their educable characteristics and in 
their possibihties for development. You cannot fold, 
press and squeeze ten yards of cloth into a space that 
will only hold five yards. If, however, a person is 
endowed with a fine, highly organized, delicate and 
sensitive textural nervous system, a comparison with 
a coarser brain organism might be made, just as silk 
can be compared with wool, and it would be quite 
possible to fold and press ten yards of silk cloth into 
a space of given size which would only hold a very 
much smaller quantity of woolen cloth. Moreover, 
every person is born with instinctive and congenital 
brain powers. Such mental tendencies may help or 
hinder the individual ; some suggest activities which 
lead to the demonstration of natural talents, others 
tend to obstruct the education of the brain and the 
development of brain forces especially fitted to cope 
with the new conditions of a rapidly advancing civ- 
ilization and changed order of hfe. 

It has been said that there are two series of brain 
mechanisms — instinctive and individually acquired — 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 47 

and "to the educable animal, the less there is of spe- 
cialized mechanism transmitted by heredity, the bet- 
ter. The loss of instinct is what permits and neces- 
sitates the education of the receptive brain." The 
size and shape of a person's brain is not individually 
acquired, although investigations indicate that even 
this can be slightly modified, especially during the 
earlier part of life ; texture and quality of organiza- 
tion are not individually acquired for they are in- 
herited just as are the texture of the skin, fineness 
of the hair, and the general primary temperament. 

The will or personality in embryo comes at birth 
and it is this power dominating the mind and the 
brain which alone can make the brain efficient and 
great, on the one hand, or, through inertia and slug- 
gish indifference, drift into mediocrity. It has been 
well said that "A great personality (will power) 
may possibly make a great brain, but no brain (of 
itself) can make a great personahty." Whereas, 
inherent brain power can be measured by the qual- 
ity, quantity and size of the cells of gray matter, 
actual or demonstrated brain power is determined 
by cerebral activity, the use of the brain cells and 
the variety of the habitual contacts which are estab- 
lished as a result of the exercise, development and 
education of the cells. A novice, void of musical 
talent and experience, may sit at the piano and as a 
result of his activity, produce only a few dissimilar, 
unappealing sounds, whereas an artist promptly 
ehcits varied melodies and exquisite harmonies 
from the same set of 88 keys. So it is with the cells 
of the human brain. A man without the will to learn 
and achieve, and lacking in perseverance and con- 



48 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

centration required for effective education, is able 
to extract only vague and rudimentary ideas from 
his cerebral cells, whereas a trained thinker, who has 
obeyed the promptings of a dominant will, will 
bring forth from the same number of cells, intellec- 
tual promptings and thoughts, which vibrate in syn- 
chronism with the great forces of Cosmic progress 
and tend to make the man a virile force in the world. 

Not merely a part, but the entire human brain 
should be used with all its area to receive impres- 
sions and to exercise its pecuhar faculty of increas- 
ing its superficial surface to conform to the require- 
ments brought forth by mental development. A 
man using part of his brain and neglecting to use 
other parts of equal or perhaps greater importance, 
is like a leader of an orchestra who endeavors to play 
a Beethoven Symphony, excluding from the score 
certain or all of the wood winds, or many of the 
strings, and possibly the most necessary brass in- 
struments. Is it not strange and inconsistent that a 
man who only uses one-quarter of his brain facul- 
ties should ridicule the idea of using only one leg or 
one arm and scorn to seriously consider and appre- 
ciate the analogy between the use and disuse of cer- 
tain parts of the body, the exercise of which is under 
the control of the human will? 

It has been stated that because man has two 
brains and can use only one, no matter how well ed- 
ucated he may be, he cannot be more than 50 per 
cent, mentally efficient. Man has been favored 
quite generally with a duality of organs, such as two 
ears, two eyes, two nostrils, two lungs, two kidneys ; 
his limbs are also in pairs and with the exception of 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 49 

a few internal organs, man is a symmetrical crea- 
ture, which if divided through a central vertical 
axis, square with the front of the body, would pro- 
duce two parts generally similar. 

The prime reason for the creation of organs in 
pairs was probably to insure against emergencies 
and, to a certain extent, for convenience and effi-* 
ciency in practical use. It has never been claimed, 
however, that a man with two good ears is twice as 
perfect in hearing or can hear twice as much as the 
man with one. We do not say that a man with 
one eye is only half as efficient in regard to sight, 
or can only see half as much as the man who is 
favored with the vision of two eyes. A man may 
lose one kidney and yet if he lives sanely, the re- 
maining kidney grows to its responsibilities and 
functions effectively, doing the work of the two. 
It has been well demonstrated that, with the partial 
exception of the hands and feet, if it becomes neces- 
sary, either one of any pair of body organs can do 
the work of the original two. What one eye sees, 
both see and what one ear hears, both hear; one 
eye does not see the colors toward the violet end 
of the spectrum and the other eye all the colors to- 
waid the red end, neither does one ear hear all the 
sounds that vibrate in intensity below Middle C, 
and the other ear perceive all the sounds with higher 
ranges of vibration, or one ear hear noise and the 
other music, or one French and the other English. 
It is, therefore, evident that man with duality of 
certain organs is well insured against injury and 
possible loss, and the utilization of these working 
organs below the full power for which each might be 



50 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

capable of functioning under stress, is no reflec- 
tion upon the efficiency of the human organism but 
must be viewed as a wise precautionary measure 
adopted by Mother Nature. It has been well said 
that an army is no stronger than its reserves. 

The division of the human brain into hemis- 
pheres, a right and a left, is an ordinance of nature 
that corresponds with the double constitution of 
other parts of the body, but whereas one of the 
body dual organs may do the work of both, this 
law only holds as regards the brain in respect to 
thought itself. The right hemisphere of the brain 
controls the voluntary movements of the left part 
of the body, and the left brain controls the right 
part of the body; if the right brain is injured the 
left half of the body becomes paralyzed, and vice 
versa. The human brain, which is a physical and 
material thing, was not made in two parts as a 
dual organ with the idea of increasing man's men- 
tal capacity. One hemisphere of our brain might 
be totally destroyed but if the surviving half re- 
mained absolutely perfect and intact, although our 
physical body would suffer and be paralyzed on 
one side, nevertheless, our mental processes would 
not be impaired. If one considers the brain as an 
organ secreting thought, as the liver secretes bile, 
and if we had two such organs that could not per- 
form more work than one, then one of the brain 
hemispheres being ample for our mental require- 
ments, the other would become somewhat super- 
fluous. The brain, however, does not secrete 
thought; gray matter is not constantly and auto- 
matically producing mental product, for the brain, 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 51 

though the seat of the mind, is but the instrument 
of the will and the mechanism used by the Thinker, 
who, having two sets of apparati, chooses to use 
but one. 

Thomson says, "I have been informed by watch- 
makers that they grow so accustomed to the use of 
only one of their eyes at their work that in time 
they become unable to use the other eye for it. The 
human thinker likewise becomes so accustomed to 
use only one of his brain pair for thought that it is 
doubtful if he ever uses its fellow to formulate a 
single idea. With which one of the pair he will 
choose to do his thinking for Hfe depends upon a 
sort of accident, almost of the nature of a whim, 
during the days of childhood." No man, when 
educating the brain, can compound the task and 
train both brains at once. When a book is placed 
on the library shelf of the Right brain, a similar 
book is not placed on the corresponding shelf in the 
Left brain, although the space is there for it; if, 
however, the Right brain should become injured 
and unusable, the same effort expended under iden- 
tical conditions in placing the original book on the 
shelf in the Right brain, would place the same book 
in proper position in the surviving and still usable 
Left brain. 

Man is a creature of habit. In early childhood 
he either instinctively uses one hand far more than 
the other, or is taught to do so. A common admoni- 
tion to children is "Use the right hand." Grad- 
ually the left hand and arm lose their cunning and 
the majority of people become so one-sided in their 
physical upper limb development that they cannot 



52 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

write at all with the opposite hand, and if of athletic 
bent and right-handed, would make a ludicrous 
picture endeavoring to play golf, tennis, or pitch or 
bat a baseball, left-handed. As we acquire a right 
or left-handed habit in childhood so we acquire a 
right or left-handed brain habit and as it takes years 
to acquire certain knowledge through the laborious 
process of education, so it will take long years to re- 
acquire the same knowledge by the same process 
of education, if such knowledge has been placed in 
our right-hand storehouse or hbrary and the right 
hemisphere of the brain should later become im- 
paired and its usefulness lost. As the brain is more 
plastic and educable in childhood and youth, what 
it takes months to learn in one's early days it may 
take years to acquire in after life, and if the mind 
is not a well-disciphned one, the task to a man in 
mature life, or to one Hving in his declining years, 
becomes formidable and generally insurmountable. 
It has been stated that as the centers for speech 
and other purely mental functions are located only 
in the brain hemisphere related to the most used 
hand in early life, the teaching of ambidexterity to 
children would be of great advantage. Owing to 
the crossing of main nerve leads from left to right 
and right to left at the base of the brain, the left 
brain controls the right half of the body, and vice 
versa; moreover, it is said that in right-handed per- 
sons the left brain is used for speech and other men- 
tal processes, and in left-handed persons, the right 
brain. Primitive man was probably ambidextrous, 
and many infants and young children exhibit the 
same tendency. Modern life and the tenets of our 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 53 

civilization have decreed that to write with the right 
hand and to use the right hand whenever one hand 
is to be used, are proper and good form, hence man- 
kind is enslaved to capricious conventions. 

If children were trained to be ambidextrous it 
could do no harm and it could not shock the real 
human sensibihties, but it would result in a superior, 
all-round development and it is barely possible that 
the human brain might, as a result, be made more 
uniformly educable. It is ridiculous to suppose 
that an ambidextrous person would gain in mental 
capacity; there could be no doubling of mental 
faculties, for we hear no more with two effective 
and sensitive ears than we do with one, but it is 
within the range of possibility that the practice of 
ambidexterity, which tends to develop all parts uni- 
formly and normally, might influence the educable 
characteristics of the brain and tend to keep it in a 
more suitable physical condition to receive impres- 
sions in case it should have to be educated in later 
life, due to derangement of its fellow brain. 

It is extremely doubtful if the simultaneous edu- 
cation of both brain hemispheres is possible; if it 
were, ambidexterity would be of such great ad- 
vantage to the race that, as mental insurance, its 
practice would be demanded by all thinking per- 
sons. It is possible, however, that in the case of an 
ambidextrous person, some shelves would be used 
on one side of the brain for certain purposes and 
other shelves on the other side for different pur- 
poses, as there would be no side of natural prefer- 
ence or original pre-eminence; thus in the case of 
damage to one brain hemisphere, only part and not 



54 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

all of the mental power obtained as a result of long 
years of absorption and education would be lost. 

This consideration of brain hemispheres and 
duality of organs does not, as has been claimed, 
affect the law of brain size in relation to mental 
power. All that has been said in regard to the 
brain, size, weight, surface, extent of gray matter, 
texture and organization refers to the used and 
active hemisphere just as completely as to the entire 
brain, and no one during life can tell with scientific 
exactness which half of his brain he is using. As 
the cranium is symmetrical in dimensions and in its 
proportions in relation to vertical central axes, it is 
fitting that we should continue to speak of the 
brain as a whole, and all arguments presented in 
regard to use and disuse are driven home with aug- 
mented force when we ponder on the thought that 
one-half of our brain is developed and educated 
and the other half is not and yet both halves occupy 
similar space. As before stated, it is not brain 
size, even with uniform texture and quality of or- 
ganization, that determines the brain power of an 
individual, but it is the relative degree of develop- 
ment and the use that he is making of his brain. 
Brain size tells us what his inherent powers and 
original endowments were, but it fails to tell us 
what he is doing with his mental equipment. 

The human brain is a plastic, receptive organ, 
capable of being fashioned and educated, which 
process produces modifications and changes in the 
physical brain matter. As is well known, this plas- 
ticity or power of educabihty generally diminishes 
progressively with age, especially in regard to the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 55 

acquirement of languages and kindred mental ac- 
tivities. What is easily acquired, however, is usually 
easily lost, and as the plasticity of the brain is in- 
creased, its elasticity or tendency to return to its 
original condition is conspicuously noticeable. The 
brain is like a plastic, moldable, receiving surface 
upon which is impressed the record of what the will 
decrees it shall receive. It operates in a manner 
very similar to the production of talking-machine 
records and the brain receives the master and orig- 
inal impressions. In some cases, however, exercise 
and frequent identical impressions are necessary be- 
fore the brain records the impression so that it can 
be later used with definiteness and accuracy; in 
other cases one impression, one experience, or one 
thought seems to be so indelibly registered that it 
apparently defies the obliterating onslaught of 
time. 

The clearness and lasting properties of a brain 
impression are influenced by attention, concentra- 
tion and purpose. Interest, intensity of vibration 
and mental (not physical) nearness, appreciation 
of worth and importance, association, also violence 
of impression or mental shock are all factors in- 
fluencing the thoroughness and accuracy of its im- 
pressions and the retention of the record when once 
its vibrations are embedded in the plastic gray mat- 
ter of the brain. The will not only can command the 
receiving and recording of impressions, but it has 
the power to place any record, which may have been 
catalogued and filed in the cerebral archives, how 
and when it desires, upon the instrument of thought- 
production, and the needle that plays in its grooves 



56 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

will bring back to the mind the thought, the word, 
the tune or the picture as it was originally impressed 
or photographed upon the plastic or sensitized brain. 

To be educated, the human mind must be exer- 
cised and disciplined. Knowledge is acquired by 
learning, and learning by effort. Attention plus 
work is a formula for success when attention con- 
sists of an awakened desire for knowledge, analyti- 
cal reflectiveness and the concentration of mental 
forces; and work signifies actual, efficient applica- 
tion and the intelligent utilization of energy. Ac- 
tivity is synonymous with life, indolent inertia with 
death. Discipline has been defined by Webster as 
"subjection to rule, submission to order and control 
by severe systematic training." Discipline does 
not repress activity but encourages and directs it; 
the disciplined mind is one that expends its efforts in 
the right direction; that can concentrate on a task 
and acquire knowledge by digging for truth and 
fact and persevere in the task until success is at- 
tained, instead of skipping lightly over the high 
points as a butterfly flits among the flowers. 

The human mind, if it is to learn any new sub- 
ject or branch of knowledge, must be willing to go 
through a long, laborious process and build from 
the bottom up. As one advances in years, one is 
not usually willing to commence with learning the 
alphabet of a subject but desires to form words and 
sentences with letters unlearned. We cannot learn 
by proxy nor travel by royal roads or reliable short- 
cuts to knowledge. The road as charted by the 
great Cosmic Mind must be traveled and it is in- 
variably up grade and rocky, but to the enthusiastic 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 57 

seeker for truth, the outlook is not only satisfying 
but appealing, and the time consumed, well and 
happily spent. To the true seeker for knowledge, 
the soul expands as truths are acquired ; the mind is 
nurtured, developed and strengthened by mental 
food as the body is by physical food. The thinker 
will keep his feet upon the solid earth and his heart 
in touch with his fellow man, but his soul soars be- 
yond the sordidness of physical existence and, as 
Huxley said, "He stands as on a mountain top 
transfigured from his lower nature, by reflecting 
here and there a ray from the infinite source of 
truth." 

Brains are bequeathed to man at birth. A cham- 
ber filled with relatively highly organized nerve 
matter is presented to him with all its inherent 
possibilities, to fashion as he himself elects. It is 
true that he is limited in regard to the development 
of certain characteristics, and the plasticity, sensi- 
tiveness and texture of his brain may be very dif- 
ferent from those of his fellows. The amount of 
brain with which he is endowed may be more or less 
than that bequeathed to his neighbor, but after all 
man must develop his own mental power and, we 
might say, make his own brain. 

It is not the hereditary limitation of our brain 
matter and mental processes that should interest us, 
for no man ever achieves the absolute limit of his 
possibilities in any direction, but we should be con- 
cerned in what we are accomplishing with all of 
the gray matter entrusted to our care. With, say, 
one hundred zones of opportunity, how many are 
we using, and of the zones or areas of gray matter 



58 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

actually being used, what efficiency is being realized 
with each and what would be our aggregate mental 
efficiency if it could be scientifically determined and 
revealed to us ? The finest brain mechanism in the 
world, lying dormant and fallow, is impotent and 
useless ; only a human will functioning in harmony 
with Cosmic Law can dominate such a nervous mass 
and by concentrated and persistent effort, attune it 
so that it can speak its message to the world as an 
important instrument in the great orchestra of life. 



Ill 

As a man molds and develops his gray matter, 
he creates himself. To a great extent, Hfe is 
just what we will it; happiness is recompense 
for work well done, and misery generally follows in 
the wake of irresponsibility, erroneous ideals, sloth- 
fulness and the violation of nature's laws. 

Life is motion, activity, work, and we accomplish 
and attain in life whatever we sincerely and earnest- 
ly want enough to strive and work for. Obstacles 
and resistance to progress and achievement develop 
mental power, stamina and the strength and cour- 
age of the will; a persistent and purposeful will 
admits of no defeat and is ever ready to pick up the 
gauntlet of fate in the battle for knowledge, truth 
and right. Sturgis IngersoU has aptly said that 
"there is no one so lucky as to get the prizes of 
life without a fight, and no one so unlucky as to be 
without the desire, no matter how deeply it may be 
buried in his nature, to make that fight." 

Success is reahzed by concentrated effort and 
hard work. The average man bemoans his luck, 
blames lack of opportunity for his failure or status 
of mediocrity and censures the Goddess Fate; the 
successful man makes his own opportunities, 
hurdles obstacles, overcomes barriers, ridicules the 
doctrine of chance, harnesses his innate forces and 
expends his efforts in achieving results, — not in de- 

59 



60 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

vising excuses. In one case, the will has no virility, 
it is spineless and flabby ; in the other, it is of finely 
tempered steel, bending but not breaking, undent- 
able and uncompromising, with power, suppleness 
and purpose. 

Many men with great inherent possibilities and 
wonderful mental endowment are not a success be- 
cause they do not will it so; they may pretend or 
even think they do, but in reality they do not even 
comprehend the meaning of the word. Success in 
life comes with whole-hearted, steady and persistent 
devotion to purpose and as a result of intelligent 
selection and elimination. Those things which 
are worth while, upbuilding and developing are 
courted; those negative, worthless and perverting 
qualities, which are often attractively garbed and 
enticingly presented, are shunned. 

The proper exercise of the will means persistent 
effort, at times great self-denial and, in early life, 
an abstinence from certain alluring pleasures for 
what may seem to be a somewhat chimerical joy of 
service; as life advances, however, realities become 
convincingly real to the philosophical mind and 
achievement the substantial satisfaction of the inner 
man. Life's battle is with oneself even more 
than with the world and the greatest fight to wage 
with oneself is not with what has been termed 
"inherent sin," but with a soul-destroying inertia, a 
lethargic indifference to the expenditure of mis- 
guided energy and to the appreciation of one's 
powers and possibihties for usefulness, service and 
achievement. The greatest blessing that could 
come to man would be a true inner vision which 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 61 

would demand that he always see himself conspicu- 
ously and convincingly revealed in all his short- 
comings, and with all his unimproved opportunities 
lying before him, each with its peculiar possible 
achievement portrayed. 

Eliot has said, "Nobody has any right to find life 
uninteresting or unrewarding who sees within the 
sphere of his own activity anything which he can 
help to remedy, or within himself a deficiency which 
he can hope to overcome." The trouble with the 
average man is that he will not voluntarily look 
within himself and if he is influenced to look, his 
vision is so blurred by bias and self-satisfaction that 
he will not see ; at the same time he is quite willing 
to be critical of others and see much that is wrong 
in the world and in humanity about him. Looking 
at the shortcomings within himself, he is apt to 
look through the large lens of a telescope, but he 
reverses his position of vision quickly when he looks 
at others, and as a result, the errors of oneself 
are minimized and the errors of others are magni- 
fied. Confucius said, "The disease of men is this, — 
that they neglect their own fields and go to weed 
the fields of others and that what they require from 
others is great, while what they lay upon them- 
selves is light." 

Men engaged in commercial or industrial life 
frequently take a carefully prepared and checked 
inventory of their stock; raw and manufactured 
materials are carefully measured, counted and 
weighed, and values placed thereon. In a well con- 
ducted manufacturing business the condition of the 
inventory and the nature and quality of the ma- 



62 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

terials in process are always known, and the mechan- 
ism of production is kept at a high degree of effi- 
ciency. Why should we not take a similar inven- 
tory of our gray matter, determine the efficiency 
of brain mechanism and study the output of our 
"Thought Factory"? The manufacturer or mer- 
chant knows whether he has ten or five cases of a 
commodity in his warehouse and he knows the 
grade and value of every item of his stock; the 
average man does not know whether his brain con- 
tains ten or one unit of a certain Thought Power 
and betrays no interest in regard to quality or value 
of the product of mental processes, or in the effi- 
ciency and scientific utilization of his apparatus for 
producing thought and acquiring knowledge. 

In a well organized factory there should be crea- 
tion, industry and power at work, with energy eif ec- 
tivel}^ expended in every department, all to produce 
a valuable product — a perfect whole. It is futile 
to run one department of a factory, or one small 
section of the human brain, with extreme efficiency, 
and to its designed output, if other necessary de- 
partments are lagging behind or are closed down 
because of lack of help, shortage of power, dearth 
of materials, inaccurate drawings, or absence of 
executive supervision. In a well conducted fac- 
tory, production proceeds as a cycle or a flux, and 
this with machine-like precision. Coordination 
and team work must be in evidence, but the prime 
essential to success is that every shop, every depart- 
ment, and every machine must economically turn 
out its full quota of work of a certain prescribed 
quahty within a predetermined time. If a man's 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 63 

brain functioned as an efficient factory, operating 
under truly scientific management, with an organ- 
ization of workers in complete harmony and with 
a skilled executive of vision and sympathy, who 
could estimate what power such a dominant, virile 
mentahty would be in the world? 

The efficient or superior man knows the art of 
living and makes the most out of what nature has 
given him; every phase of hfe must be considered, 
no section of gray matter can be ignored, and he is, 
therefore, not only a worker, industrious and thor- 
ough, but also intensely human, manly in the high- 
est sense, sympathetic, reachable, lovable. Dresser 
has well said that "Efficiency is not a merely 
vocational idea but pertains to the whole of life. 
It is a human question." The efficient man must 
be adaptable and should not ignore any factor with- 
in or without himself. He is of necessity a man of 
thought, purpose and action. His brain was 
created for action, his gray matter is developed by 
action and his success lies in carrying the wisdom of 
the mental world into realization in the external 
world. 

Greatness is all-round development. A brain 
abnormally developed in any one or more isolated 
parts and neglected elsewhere, is not great. Such 
unnatural growth or unusual and conspicuous over- 
development of any one part or parts of the physi- 
cal body supply the freaks for the circus-shows and 
the doers of stunts on the vaudeville stage. A 
great money-maker is not necessarily a great man; 
he may have a marked faculty for making money 
but may have no faculty for enjoying or properly 



64 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

utilizing it. If a man neglects and ignores impor- 
tant parts of his gray matter and devotes all his 
time and energy to the development and use of 
some other part, he becomes abnormal, unnatural, 
lop-sided, and may ultimately prove a menace to 
society. Even if his object is praiseworthy, he can 
never be efficient; he may do some good in the 
world but he is not doing the greatest possible good 
and one is constrained to ask, "What is he doing to 
himself?" 

If we saw a man spending days, weeks and 
months writing books, using a wonderful brain and 
hand, and sending splendid messages out into the 
world but refusing to walk and exercise his body, 
we would feel that his meritorious work was no 
justification for the abuse of nature; while, if he 
exercised sanely and complied with nature's laws, 
he would probably do even better and more in- 
spiring literary work. A man who refuses to use, 
and by use develop, any part of his brain is like a 
man who refuses to use a hand or a leg or even one 
or more of his prime physical senses. A man is 
readily cognizant of any physical defect which af- 
fects his sense organs, locomotion or bodily func- 
tions, for such imperfections are conspicuously 
detrimental to his physical activities and enjoy- 
ment, but why is he not equally cognizant of mental 
deficiency or incompleteness? Confucius said, 
"When a man's finger is deformed he knows enough 
to be dissatisfied, but if his mind be deformed he 
does not know that he should be dissatisfied. This 
is called 'Ignorance of the relative importance of 
things.' " 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 65 

The world needs today human minds with psychi- 
cal beauty, analogous to the aesthetic perfection of 
the physical body of the ancient Greeks ; every part 
well molded and formed, every muscle supple, every 
detail, as well as the whole, the embodiment of effi- 
ciency, strength and grace. The Greeks believed 
in athletics — exercise — to develop and perfect the 
body, for tissues and muscles, like the gray matter 
of the brain, are educable. The great prizes of 
their later contests, however, did not go to the 
athletic specialist, the sprinter, the distance runner, 
the disc thrower, the jumper, the boxer, the chario- 
teer or the wrestler, all of whom might be expected 
to exhibit abnormal, but somewhat localized, physi- 
cal development; but it was awarded to the winner 
of the Pentathlon, who achieved glory and the 
highest possible recognition as an all-round, well- 
developed athlete, having been the victor, in aggre- 
gate points, in the five greatest and most diversified 
tests of skill. 

The ancient Greeks were great admirers of physi- 
cal perfection. They advocated and supported 
athletics in order that their ideals might be realized, 
well understanding the fundamental laws of nature 
pertaining to living matter. The Greeks of every 
social class and stratum were performers and actual 
participants themselves in their athletic games, and 
in this respect they differed from the Roman 
patricians who elected to be spectators. No man 
can develop either his body or his mind by watching 
the exertions and skill of others. Physical develop- 
ment — brain and muscle — is a decidedly personal 
matter with the individual, and attainment can only 



66 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

come from the intelligent expenditure of one's own 
effort. 

In the consideration of mental attributes and 
brain development, it is hard to say which positive 
qualities are great and which are small; all are im- 
portant; all are necessary to completeness. Dr. 
Johnson said, "The truly strong and sound mind is 
the mind that can embrace, equally, great things 
and small." No positive virtue can be considered 
small in relative importance. A bolt or a machine 
pin is each relatively very small in physical size, but 
either may permit an engine to function and per- 
form useful work, while its absence would cause a 
suspension of operation. There are many human 
interests and psychological properties branded by 
the materialist as small, insignificant and unneces- 
sary, that unless attained and developed, prevent 
mental greatness and the realization of possible and 
complete success. 

To use one's gray matter, every available square 
inch of it, and to really hve sixty minutes to every 
hour — that is success and the result is happiness. 
No lasting, unsullied joy is attained in this world 
without some difficulty, and all true happiness pre- 
supposes some effort. Action is the whole expres- 
sion of man ; his worth and happiness depend on his 
wiU, which declares itself continually to the outside 
world by deeds. 

It was long ago said and accepted that in the 
world there is nothing great but man, and in man 
there is nothing great but his mind. As it is the 
prerogative of the mind to govern and direct the 
body so also is it the rightful prerogative of the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 67 

will to direct the mind, for the human will is higher 
than the mortal mind. The will is a General who 
assumes absolute command over all the forces placed 
under his direction by Mother Nature. It is his 
business to inspect, drill and train his forces, ar- 
range them for action, be skilled in the use of sup- 
porting forces and reserves and keep each company 
up to the highest possible efficiency and the greatest 
permissible enrollment. 

A General in command of military forces would 
not care to engage in modern warfare, equipped 
with only a few brigades of infantry, or with only 
infantry and cavalry. He would insist upon in- 
fantry, cavalry, heavy artillery, light machine gun 
companies, engineers, aviators, signal men, trans- 
portation, commissary, ambulance. Red Cross rep- 
resentation, etc., and each in the required strength, 
in order to provide that proper harmony of forces 
which experience has proven to be essential to mod- 
ern army efficiency. When these forces are in the 
field they are controlled, regulated and directed 
by one strong central authority who, as a strategist, 
arranges the operation of the combat. 

The human will is the central authority of the 
mind ; and brain or intellectual discipline is as neces- 
sary for mental success as military disciphne is for 
achievement in warfare. The presence and effi- 
ciency of a strong central power are made manifest 
in the unity and proportion of the results in both 
military and commercial armies or organizations. 
When this authority is absent, confusion and chaos 
are in evidence; when the central and governing 
authority is not strong enough to efficiently control 



68 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

the forces under command, too much energy is spent 
in one direction, too little in another or a vacillating 
policy is inaugurated which brings inevitable dis- 
aster and failure. The General of the human mind 
has a great diversity of forces to bring up to the 
battle line; much of his army may be like "Crom- 
well's raw clodhoppers" or "Kitchener's mob," — 
great fighters in embryo, and it will be his task to 
train them to become veritable "ironsides" and take 
their place later in the fight; but every section of 
the brain must first be trained and developed and 
then used to do its ordained work as must every 
department of an army. No part of a man's gray 
matter can do the work of another any more than 
one arm of the service, with its peculiar training 
and characteristics, is fitted to do the work of an- 
other department. 

Hamerton has said, "The origin of discipline is 
the desire to do not merely our best with the degree 
of power and knowledge which, at the time, we do 
actually happen to possess, but with that which we 
might possess if we submitted to the necessary train- 
ing." Whatever our ideas may be in regard to 
Military Preparedness, the advisability of advocat- 
ing and practicing Mental Preparedness is axio- 
matic and unquestionable. But are we wilhng to go 
through with the grind, the drill, and the hardships 
incidental to thorough training? Are we willing 
to make the necessary and unavoidable sacrifices? 
Mental Preparedness means work, persistent, ener- 
getic and concentrated work, with sometimes no re- 
ward in sight, — only the inner satisfaction of being 
true to ideals, of embracing and meeting squarely 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 69 

life's opportunities for service, and of expressing 
in no uncertain way, our convictions and soul prin- 
ciples. Mental discipline is necessary before in- 
tellectual eminence can be achieved and whereas 
no will can, by the most concentrated and prodigious 
effort, make a genius out of a man endowed with 
but ordinary gray matter, — extent and texture, — 
nevertheless, a will that absolutely commands and 
controls all the mental faculties, and disciplines and 
trains the mind, will make not only for efficiency 
but for culture, happiness and success in the field 
for which the mind is fitted to effectively function. 
A worthy ambition for any will is the subjuga- 
tion and conquest of the mind. To break a per- 
son's will, particularly a child's, is a crime against 
nature, whereas to harness and control one's own 
mind and dominate it by the force of one's will is 
absolutely in harmony with nature. Alexander of 
Macedon, a soldier of conquest, wept when he heard 
from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number 
of worlds, and his friends asking him if any harm 
had befallen him, he replied, "Do you not think it 
a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is 
such a vast multitude of worlds, we have not yet 
conquered one?" Alexander was one of the most 
dominant physical characters in history; he con- 
quered a great part of the known world, but he 
could not conquer himself, and after only three de- 
cades of life, we are told that he died at Babylon 
as a result of a night and a day's continuous de- 
bauchery and depraved dissipation — part of his 
wonderful brain neglected and undeveloped and his 



70 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

mind undisciplined by what men erroneously be- 
lieved to be an iron will. 

Physical appetites, uncontrolled by the human 
will, weakened and destroyed Hannibal, the Car- 
thaginian (247-183 B. C), another famous world 
conqueror. This powerful King, victorious in 
arms, and whom neither snow, distance nor geo- 
graphical mountainous barriers could vanquish, was 
conquered by sensuous pleasure, and although re- 
sisting the onslaughts of all armed foes, finally suc- 
cumbed to the subtle, enervating luxuries of Cam- 
pania. Hannibal was destined by his father to 
succeed him in the work of vengeance against Rome, 
and from his earliest youth he felt his great life's 
task to be the conquest and humiliation of Rome. 
He was the greatest military tactician of all time, a 
master of military science, and in the use of strategy 
and ambuscades, he surpassed not only all the Gen- 
erals of Antiquity but also the Military Command- 
ers of the entire historical period. 

The Romans were enraged with their Emperor, 
Fabius Maximus, the Delayer, because of his cau- 
tious military tactics in dealing with Hannibal and 
his army of Africans, Spaniards and Gauls; but 
whenever they departed from his policy, they were 
defeated. What the Roman legions failed to do 
by force, however, was ultimately accomplished in 
their behalf by sunny, sensuous Italy. Hannibal's 
army was decimated by disease, he himself lost the 
sight of one eye, and later, as a fugitive in Asia, 
closely pursued by the relentless bloodhounds of 
Imperial Rome, when capture and death seemed 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 71 

inevitable, he hastened his end by self -administered 
poison. 

Mark Antony (83-30 B. C.) had great inherent 
ability, but not the will power to control his sen- 
suous appetite and direct his forces persistently 
along worth-while, constructive lines for the good 
of humanity and himself. In youth, he gave many 
exhibitions of profligacy; when Deputy Governor 
of Italy in 47 B. C, during the time Caesar was in 
Africa, he "seized the opportunity of indulging in 
the most extravagant excesses." After the murder 
of Caesar and the wars for supremacy, he became 
one of the three Joint Rulers of the Roman Trium- 
virate. In 41 B. C, he fell a victim to the allure- 
ments of Cleopatra, in whose company at Alexan- 
dria, he spent time and dissipated energies that 
should have been devoted to the interests of the 
Empire. In 39 B. C, at Athens, he showed that 
his will had been weakened by sensuality and disso- 
luteness by behaving in a most extravagant, vol- 
uptuous manner, assuming the attitude of the god 
Dionysus. He proved false to the Roman Em- 
pire, disposed of kingdoms and provinces in favor 
of Cleopatra and, in 32 B. C, the Senate deprived 
him of his power and declared war against Cleo- 
patra. 

When Cleopatra became convinced that her mili- 
tary forces had no hope of ultimate success, Oc- 
tavian suggested that she assassinate her lover. 
This degenerate woman had been the paramour of 
Julius Caesar in Rome up to the time of his assassin- 
ation. For her another Roman Ruler had banished 
ideals, stifled his conscience and numbed his soul. 



72 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

and she had previously killed one brother in war and 
poisoned another because they stood in the way of 
her ambitions. Accepting the proposal of Oc- 
tavian, she enticed Antony (32 B. C.) to join her 
in a mausoleum which she claimed to have built in 
order that they might die together. Antony was 
influenced to commit suicide in the mistaken belief 
that Cleopatra had already done so. He died a 
broken, defeated man, his life of great promise and 
opportunity a dire failure through weakness of 
will. Adversity and necessity stimulated Mark 
Antony's great inner powers in early life to great 
achievement, but in prosperity and success he 
yielded unresistingly to sensuous temptation and 
promptly succumbed to dissipation. 

Vitellius (15-69 A. D.) was Roman Emperor 
for one year; he was neither ambitious nor schem- 
ing, but he owed his elevation to the good-will of 
the soldiery with whom his outrageous prodigaUties 
and excessive good nature, although agreeable in 
its novelty and license, soon proved fatal to order 
and discipline. Vitellius was a man with deplor- 
ably weak will, whose sense of pleasure was grati- 
fication of appetite. He was lazy, self-indulgent, 
and, as is usual with men of this type whom destiny 
has bred or fickle fate has raised to positions of 
power, he was absolutely dominated by two of his 
military commanders, Csecina and Valens. These 
men engineered the Military Revolution which put 
their dissipated leader on the throne. VitelHus 
apparently tried to govern wisely, but he was de- 
plorably weak and completely under the control of 
Cgecina and Valens who, for their own selfish ends, 
encouraged him in vicious excesses. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 73 

The army of Vitellius reached Rome as a licen- 
tious mob of ruffians and the Imperial City became 
the seat of riot, massacre, extravagant feasting, de- 
bauchery and inordinate sensuous vice. Retribu- 
tion — the inevitable — came when Vespasian, a man 
of himible origin but of great strength of character, 
was declared Emperor, and Vitellius was paraded 
through the streets, treated with contempt and 
derision; with a sword held beneath his chin, to 
make him keep up his head so that all could see the 
weak, dissipated and sensuous face of an Imperial 
monster, he reached the fatal Gemonian Stairs 
where he was mercilessly struck down; — thus per- 
ished the Emperor who was ruining the morals and 
power of his country in order that he and his com- 
panions might continue their unhcensed debauchery. 

The weak will of Alexander resulted in the death, 
in early manhood, of a life full of promise with great 
but unbridled power ; the weakness of Hannibal and 
his followers defeated the whole life purpose of an 
otherwise strong and brilliant man ; the will of An- 
tony was not powerful enough to withstand success 
and prosperity, subjugate sensuous appetites and 
subordinate worldly pleasure to duty and the ac- 
compHshment of his life's work; he proved a traitor 
to his country and became his own executioner. 
Vitelhus, through weakness of will and the subtle 
domination of associates, ruined himself and his 
country; he steeped a nation in vice and caused 
Imperial Rome to degenerate to a sensuous, un- 
principled and undisciplined mob, which blindly 
staggered in its drunkenness to the brink of the 
precipice of economic, patriotic and spiritual ruin. 



74 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

A man's will functions as a continual expression 
of his individual freedom; without freedom of the 
will, morality becomes a meaningless, senseless 
term and the moral consciousness of every normal, 
thinking person accepts without hesitation the 
postulate of freedom. Will is expressed in the 
rendering of decisions affecting one's conduct, and 
the quality of one's will is reflected in one's thinking 
and in the motives which inspire action. The pre- 
dominating attributes of will are, therefore. Free 
Choice and Purpose. A strong will is not neces- 
sarily a good will, for it may be wrongly directed, 
but every weak will is of necessity an immoral, 
defective instrument, indicative of incomplete man- 
hood. The first essential of virtue is strength, and 
the second, of equal importance, is purpose, which 
energetically directs one toward the ideal. 

W. H. Thomson has said that it is the masterful, 
personal will which makes the brain human. A 
mind thinking according to will and not according 
to reflex action, constitutes a purposive life. The 
human endowment of a personal will constitutes 
the high privilege granted to every man to test how 
much the man will make of himself. It is clothed 
v^th powers which will enable him to obtain the 
greatest of all possessions — self-possession — which 
implies the capacity for self-restraint, self -compul- 
sion and self-direction. 

The complete life is one where the hand of the 
real inner self grasps firmly, at all times, the tiller 
which steers the human craft through the tempes- 
tuous seas of life toward the Cosmic Goal. To steer 
toward the wrong port or to alternately direct one's 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 75 

course toward two destinations, geographically or 
ethically opposed, or to occasionally move with 
power and purpose toward a definite goal, while 
at other times one drifts aimlessly wherever the 
current of thoughtlessness, materialism and crowd 
movements take him, is to live a life of error and 
failure and to ultimately experience the retributive 
condemnation of an outraged Cosmos, whose fun- 
damental law is Cause and Effect — the immutable 
law of nature's just compensation. 

"There is no wrong by any one committed 

but will recoil, 
Its sure return, with double ill repeated, 

no skill can foil. 
As on the earth, the mist it yields to heaven 

descends in rain. 
So on his head who e'er has evil given, 

it falls again. 
It is the law of life, that retribution 

shall follow wrong; 
It never fails, although the execution 

may tarry long." 



IV 

EMERSON said, "There can be no driving 
force except through the conversion of the 
man into his will, making him the will, and 
the will him/' Man's driving power, which con- 
quers nature, harnesses her forces and lifts human- 
ity nearer to the great Cosmic Ideal, is the energy 
of the free himian will, unfettered by tradition or 
soulless convention, indifferent to mob opinions, but 
persistent and courageous in striving to perform 
that which is suggested by indwelling reason, stim- 
ulated by the universal spirit of creation and prog- 
ress. A strong and perfect will is master of the 
body, lord over all the mind-faculties and high 
priest of the moral self. The world's work which 
withstands the ravages of time and survives and 
grows to the eternal benefit of humanity, has been 
performed by strong wills with purpose, in harmony 
with the supreme Cosmic Will. The ideal, or im- 
aginative picture of the goal, can only be realized 
by purpose and will. These supply the motive 
power and that determined, persistent, unwavering 
energy which is ever needed in good measure, when 
new paths have to be opened up, obstructions over- 
come and pioneer work performed. 

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) had the pur- 
pose and the will. His father was a poor wool- 
comber of Genoa. When fourteen years of age the 

77 



78 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

lad was a roustabout, then a wharfinger, later a 
sailor, and at nineteen a weaver; but when twenty- 
eight years old we find him, as a result of self -in- 
struction, making maps and charts. He believed 
that the world was a sphere and conceived the idea 
of reaching Asia and the fabulously wealthy land of 
India by sailing west, thus opening up a water trade 
route which would be easier to negotiate and offer 
more freedom than the existing caravan route. After 
many discouragements, Columbus sailed west- 
ward in 1492, with three small vessels whose crews 
aggregated eighty-eight, recruited from "criminals 
and broken men." He fought the elements, super- 
stition, fear and the mutinous tendency of his bellig- 
erent crew and his dominant will finally triumphed 
over the hardships, discouragements and antago- 
nisms of the voyage, as it had previously prevailed 
over the heart-breaking, deterring opposition en- 
countered during the unfolding and development of 
his plans. 

Eventually Columbus reached the islands of the 
western world — the discoverer of a new continent 
and a wonderful land that was destined to mate- 
rially influence the unfolding history of all man- 
kind. He carried letters to the Emperor of China, 
and when he returned to Spain, he thought that he 
had been in Japan and had thus proved conclusive- 
ly by travel that the world was round. He jour- 
neyed to find a new trade route, but he found a new 
world, and mankind will forever be a debtor to the 
memory of the man of vision, with robust, powerful 
will, who saw and acted, undeterred and undis- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 79 

mayed, when all mankind and the elements seemed 
to combine to challenge his progress. 

Richard Arkwright (1732-1792), the inventor of 
the spinning frame and the father of the modern 
factory, was the youngest of thirteen children ; born 
of very humble, illiterate EngMsh parents, he grew 
to manhood without education. As a youth he was 
apprenticed to a barber, and it has been well said 
that "Fate was in a jesting mood when she de- 
creed that the chief actor in that remarkable social 
drama, the Industrial Revolution, should be a half- 
penny barber." But Arkwright had imagination, 
even though he was barely able to read and write. 
He saw what a successful spinning machine would 
mean and decided that he would not indefinitely 
remain a journeyman barber, day after day "shav- 
ing the stolid faces of lower class Englishmen." 
He became absorbed in models of machines, worked 
sixteen hours a day and later added two more hours 
in which he strove to acquire an education. His 
wife, Margaret Biggins, "begged him to return to 
his razor," and when he refused, she smashed the 
first working model of the spinning machine and 
later burned other models. 

But Arkwright had will and purpose, tireless 
energy, enthusiasm, perseverance and self-confi- 
dence ; believing in himself, he ultimately compelled 
others to beheve in him. His health was not ro- 
bust, but he worked at his self-appointed task un- 
ceasingly. McAtherton refused to entertain or 
even seriously consider Arkwright 's machine "be- 
cause of the rags in which the inventor was dressed." 
His townspeople rose as a wrathy mob against him. 



80 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

for his machine, they maintained, if successful, 
would shorten labor ; so the persecuted inventor had 
to flee for his life and seek refuge elsewhere, after 
seeing his few worldly possessions smashed and 
scattered to the four winds. But Arkwright per- 
sisted and ultimately won, and achieving the un- 
usual boon of recognition of his services to humanity 
before his death, he became wealthy and was 
knighted by the Crown. 

Carlyle, writing of Arkwright, said "In strop- 
ping razors, in lathering dusty beards, and the con- 
tradictions and confusions attendant thereon, the 
man had notions in that rough head of his ; spindles, 
shuttles, wheels and contrivances plying ideally 
within the same, rather hopeless looking, which, 
however, he did at last bring to bear, not without 
great difficulty. What a historical phenomenon 
is that boy-cheeked, pot-bellied, much-enduring, 
much-inventing barber!" It was this man, gawky, 
fat and unprepossessing, who gave the world the 
power of cotton and the modern factory system, 
and with his indomitable will, unwavering purpose 
and far-seeing vision, revolutionized industrial 
methods. A poor, unattractive boy, "plain, almost 
gross, with an air of painful reflection, yet also of 
copious free digestion," ignorant as regards mental 
gymnastics and reaching manhood before he could 
write a readable letter; such did fate select to lead 
in the world's great industrial revolution, because of 
his inherent practical ability to perfect mechanical 
inventions, his latent extraordinary executive ability 
and his underlying dominant, but nevertheless 
puissant, genius of organization. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 81 

Arkwright dreamed but he also worked, and he 
lived to see his dreams come true because of his own 
indefatigable virile efforts. He was ridiculed be- 
cause of his unbounded confidence in his scheme. 
He was abused as a fanatic and unmercifully gibed 
when he said that "he would yet pay the British 
National debt," but he lived to make a nation rich 
and powerful and he contributed much — far more 
than was appreciated — to the welfare and prosper- 
ity of mankind. 

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a son of a 
Thuringian mine-laborer. He had to beg in order 
to go to school, singing for alms and bread from 
door to door. "Hardship, rigorous necessity, was 
the poor boy's companion — among things, not 
among the show of things, had he to grow." A 
rude plebeian with a repulsive, sensuous face, he 
was neither idealistic nor intensely spiritual, but he 
had a rugged will that having once taken a stand, 
no earthly power could budge. When Luther de- 
clared against Tetzel's sheepskin Indulgences and 
pen and ink Pardons, when he preached that these 
were a futility and sorrowful mockery, he had no 
thought of revolting against the Pope of Rome — 
the Holy Father of Christendom — but his act led 
to the Reformation and placed Protestantism on 
its feet. 

Luther had a common, coarse nature, and vulgar 
blood surged through his veins ; devils were real to 
him and alcoholic dissipation intensified, at times, 
his hallucinations, but he had persistency and cour- 
age. In matters of principle, affecting his religion, 
even though his superstitions were great, his animal 



82 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

appetite real and his nature intolerant and fanatical, 
yet his will was strong and uncompromising and his 
purposeful courage sublime. On April 16, 1521, as 
Luther entered the Imperial City of Worms, the 
Elector's Chancellor entreated him, in the name of 
his Master, not to enter a town where his death had 
been decided upon. Luther replied, "Go tell your 
Master that if there were as many devils at Worms 
as tiles upon its roofs, I yet would enter." No mat- 
ter what our opinion of Luther and his life, or of 
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism may be, how 
truly noble and exalted are the last words of his 
defense impressively uttered to the Assembly at 
Worms, — "Confute me; I cannot recant otherwise. 
For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against 
conscience. Here stand I ; I can do no other ; God 
help me." 

These sublime words, expressive of a dominant 
will and noble purpose, recall the magnificent de- 
fense of Socrates — the greatest man of antiquity — 
a far greater man than Luther and one of the grand- 
est characters the world has ever seen. When false- 
ly accused, Socrates scorned to outline any defense 
designed to conciliate a hostile jury. His Ufe had 
been purposeful, his uncompromising will seemed to 
be of steel, his principles were fixed and unbending, 
but withal, he had a personality radiating love, sin- 
cerity, fervent piety, and soulful kindliness. It 
seemed to be decreed that his death should be in har- 
mony with his life, as was the death of The Christ 
of Nazareth. Socrates had the strong and well de- 
fined will that knows the truth and drives the mind 
forward in the paths of virtue and world usefulness, 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 83 

expressing at the same time love for his fellow man 
and absolute tolerance toward all honest opinions 
which differed from his own. "Men of Athens, I 
honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather 
than you. Either acquit me or not, but whatever 
you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not 
even if I have to die many times." And after his 
condemnation he said, "No evil can happen to a 
good man, either in life or after death. And now 
it is time to depart hence, I to die and you to live; 
but which of us goes to the better fate, no one know- 
eth save only God." 

Socrates could easily have escaped imprisonment 
and death but he remained unwaveringly true to his 
ideals and, under existing conditions, and with many 
centuries intervening, "few persons will be found 
to wish that Socrates should have defended himself 
otherwise," or as an old man, compromised with his 
bigoted, unscrupulous, jealous and politically in- 
spired opponents. He died a martyr for truth and 
freedom, and what a wonderful reputation and his- 
toric memory he left behind to vibrate through the 
ages. "No one," said Xenophon, his pupil, "ever 
knew of his doing or saying anything profane or un- 
holy." He humbled himself to the level of those 
among whom his work lay that he might raise some 
few among them to his own level. His self-control, 
we are told by one of his contemporaries, was abso- 
lute; his power of endurance unfailing and he had 
so schooled himself to moderation that his extremely 
scanty means satisfied all his wants. "To want 
nothing," he said, "is divine, to want as little as pos- 
sible is the nearest approach to the divine life." A 



84 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Sophist said to him, "A slave whose master made 
him hve as you Hve would run away," but Alcibiades 
paid this man of superior moral virtue, as well as 
brilliant intellectual attainments, a great tribute and 
expressed the belief of many of his followers when 
he said, "No one would think that I ever had any 
shame in me ; but I am ashamed of my weakness and 
uselessness when in the presence of Socrates." 

No one can fail to be inspired by the mental free- 
dom, reasoning powers, humihty, steadfastness of 
purpose and sturdiness of character of the grand 
old Democrat of the Fifth Century B. C, "So pious 
that he did nothing without taking counsel of the 
gods, so just that he never did an injury to any man, 
whilst he was the benefactor of all who associated 
with him, so temperate that he never preferred 
pleasure to right, so wise that in judging of good 
and evil he was never at fault — in a word, the best 
and happiest of men." 

Musonius Rufus, the Roman philosopher of the 
First Century of the Christian Era and the teacher 
of Epictetus, was a man of strong will and purpose, 
— a man of soul whose life expressed virtue and 
whose personality radiated kindliness and whole- 
someness ; his whole being commanded respect from 
both friends and enemies. He disdained applause, 
"If you have leisure to praise me then I am speak- 
ing to no purpose." One of his pupils wrote, "He 
used to speak in such a way that every one sitting 
there supposed that some one had accused him be- 
fore oNIusonius; he so touched upon what he was 
doing, he so placed before the eyes every man's 
shortcomings." Musonius was the Cato of his gen- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 85 

eration, trusted by all for his absolute rectitude of 
character and respected for his fearlessness. When 
the armies of Vespasian and Vitellius were fighting 
in the suburbs of Rome, he addressed the common 
soldiers, expatiating on the blessings of peace, vir- 
tue and good-will. Such an attitude in defiance of 
military discipline speaks much for the courage of 
the philosopher and demonstrates beyond doubt the 
respect in which he was held. He continued to play 
an honorable and important part in public life dur- 
ing the reign of Vespasian and was so highly es- 
teemed that he retained the confidence of the Em- 
peror even when other philosophers were expelled 
from the Capitol. Musonius had a powerful, virile 
will with a tenacious, unwavering purpose. He 
stood for the brotherhood of man and peace for all 
men and maintained that virtue, which is not a thing 
of precept or theory but a practical living reality, is 
the only real aim of men. 

In more modern times, Ulysses S. Grant (1822- 
1885) is a splendid example of will power, rightly 
applied, in mature life. To be sure, in his youth he 
was called "Useless Grant" by his mother; he re- 
signed his commission in the army in 1854, his repu- 
tation in the service having suffered from allega- 
tions of intemperate drinking. We are told that a 
short time before his father took him into his tan- 
nery at Galena, he was piling wood in the back- 
yards of St. Louis citizens. After some pottering 
in hides and leather, farming, real estate, and debt 
collecting, and after being branded by society and 
his relatives as a failure and a shiftless, broken and 
disappointed man, Grant discovered himself at 



86 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Shiloh. Whether Grant was intemperate with alco- 
hol or not (and he was probably much maligned by- 
American Brahminists and self-elected, meddlesome 
uplifters of society), he certainly possessed the iron 
determination and energy along other lines which 
more than balanced his failings. Grant always 
"stuck to the thing in hand," so far as it was worth 
while. When war brought his awareness of self to 
the point of definite meaning, he mounted to a 
height of sober heroism that the nation can never 
forget, and he retained full power over himself after 
the immediate stimulus was gone. As Haddock 
says, "He found every detail and the largest cam-r 
paign eminently worth the while of a will which had, 
at last, uncovered its highway." 

There were soldiers more accomplished, more 
brilliant, more exact, but singleness of purpose and 
relentless vigor in the execution of well defined 
plans were Grant's incomparable quahties. He had 
courage, clear judgment and pugnacious tenacity, 
all tempered with the patience and tranquillity of 
self-confidence ; he had a massive, noble and lovable 
personality. "The great thing about him," said 
Lincoln, "is cool persistency of purpose. He is not 
easily excited and he has the grip of a bulldog. 
When he once gets his teeth in, nothing can shake 
him off." After the first day's disaster at Shiloh, 
when the Confederate Army had all but driven the 
Union forces into the river. Grant sat under a tree 
with a cigar clinched between his teeth and calmly 
remarked with firm conviction, "Never mind, boys, 
we'll Hck them tomorrow." During the same bat- 
tle, when asked, "What shall we do now?" he re- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 87 

plied laconically, "Keep on fighting." Grant was 
the savior of the Union of our States and his force- 
ful will cannot be better expressed than in his fa- 
mous "Hands Off" despatch, "I purpose to fight 
it out on this line if it takes all summer." 

Washington's military career was a series of fail- 
ures — but he would not acknowledge reverses as de- 
feat. He persistently "hung on" to the enemy, he 
recrossed the icy Delaware at Trenton and snatched 
victory from the jaws of death. 

James A. Garfield had purpose and an energetic 
will. He lost his father when eighteen months old 
and was brought up, without school advantages, 
in what was then the backwoods of Ohio. As a boy, 
he did chores, chopped wood, drove a team, tilled the 
soil, and did everything he could to earn a few pen- 
nies to help his mother; he became determined to 
cultivate his mind and, by the development of his 
mentality, carve out a future for himself as a scholar 
and a teacher. At sixteen he was a driver of a canal 
boat, studying books whenever he could find an 
opportunity. Later he became a janitor at Hiram 
College ; he graduated from Williams College with 
high honors and realized his original ambition by 
being made a teacher and later, the head of Hiram 
College. 

But the world had higher spheres of opportunity 
and service to offer the young scholar from the log 
cabin of Ohio. At twenty-nine, he was made a State 
Senator; at thirty-two a Major General, and a year 
later he became a member of Congress. When 
forty-eight years old he was elected to the United 
States Senate, but before he could take his seat in 



88 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

that body he became President of the United States. 
Twenty-seven years after the time that young Gar- 
field pleaded for a chance to gain a school education 
by ringing the bells, sweeping and dusting the halls 
and performing any necessary menial tasks at Hi- 
ram College, he was elevated to the highest position 
of honor and responsibility that his fellow-men 
could offer him. 

"The heights, by great men reached and kept. 
Were not attained by sudden flight; 
But they, while their companions slept. 
Were toiling upward in the night." 

Nathan Hale (1756-1776), the young Connecti- 
cut patriot and hero of the American War of In- 
dependence, had energy, enthusiasm and will, which, 
directed by the surging and overwhelming waves of 
patriotism and love for his oppressed countrymen, 
gave him purpose and led the boy schoolmaster to 
deeds of courage along paths of great danger. He 
was one of a small band which captured an Englisfi 
provision sloop from under the very guns of a Brit- 
ish man-of-war. He was later captured when 
endeavoring to obtain information within the Brit- 
ish lines and in September of our first year of Na- 
tional Independence, notwithstanding his youth and 
noble mien, he was abominably treated and hanged 
as a spy. His last words will continue to ring 
through the ages, "I regret that I have but one life 
to lose for my country." 

Sydney Carton, an interesting life-like character 
in Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities," lacked will power, 
dissipated his forces and though of a brilliant mind, 
failed in his battles with life. How nobly he re- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 89 

deemed himself, however, when the opportunity to 
prove his love and sacrifice himself for others pre- 
sented itself! Giving his life in order that others 
might enjoy unrestrained happiness, he uttered 
these wonderfully beautiful and soulful words of 
resignation and hope, "It is a far, far better thing 
that I do than I have ever done ; it is a far, far better 
rest that I go to than I have ever known." Thus is 
portrayed the true inner nobiUty — the God in man 
— and we obtain a glimpse of what Carton would 
have been capable of, if only his will throughout the 
daily trend of life had been strong enough to persis- 
tently direct his forces along paths of sobriety and 
virtue. 

The great will power, vision and purpose ex- 
pressed in the life of Columbus resulted in no ma- 
terial benefit to himself, but operated for the eco- 
nomic advantage, happiness, freedom and prosper- 
ity of unborn generations. The wonderful vision 
and dominant will of Arkwright functioned for the 
almost immediate profit of his country, himself, and 
later, for the world and all humanity. The stead- 
fast will and soulful courage of Socrates contrib- 
uted to the mental freedom of mankind and his in- 
fluence will live as long as man exists on this planet, 
even though the grand old exponent of truth and 
virtue died a martyr to the cause of individualistic 
freedom of thought. Luther fought for freedom 
from the errors, commercialism and oppression of 
religious authority, but the movement to which he 
gave impetus and definite direction went far beyond 
the man and his intentions. The will of Musonius 
was exerted to make men reason for themselves. 



90 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

perfect themselves, love their kind and refuse to kill, 
at the dictates of external authority, their fellow 
men, toward whom personally they had no ill feeling. 
Young Garfield was determined to develop his 
mind and become capable of teaching others. His 
purposeful will and mental concentration achieved 
success and carried him far higher than his original 
ambition. Nathan Hale's will decreed that all his 
powers and resources should be given to the service 
of his oppressed land. His soul cried out for free- 
dom and he gave his all at the altar of his ideal, re- 
gretting only one thing — that he had not more to 
give. The will and bulldog tenacity of Grant abol- 
ished slavery in the United States and united a great 
people. The will, courage and unwavering purpose 
of Washington, "an imperial man," gave our coun- 
try its independence and estabhshed this great land 
of freedom and unprecedented opportunities. All 
these men had the energy to do, the mental grasp to 
appreciate a prophetic vision, the imaged goal and 
the ideal for which to strive, the wisdom to select 
and discriminate and the will to direct and hold them 
to their course through all discouragements, ob- 
structions, distractions and antagonisms. Such are 
the characteristics which, in combination with hu- 
man sympathy, human understanding, absolute 
honesty and tolerance, insure rare completeness of 
life, — the acme of human perfection, the ideal of 
individual attainment. 



V 

OVID somewhere said, "It is the mind that 
makes the man, and our vigor is in our im- 
mortal soul." It is rather the will that 
makes the man, and the will is the personality ex- 
pressing that vigor which is an attribute of the soul. 
Cicero referred to the cultivation of the mind as the 
food for the soul of man; the soul grows in power 
and usefulness as the mind is disciplined, educated 
and developed for service under the domination of 
the soul's personality or individuality — the human 
will. Developed, well-trained and usable mental 
faculties are to the soul what the limbs and physical 
senses are to the brain; the greater the culture of 
man and the more complete and thorough his mental 
development, the greater power his soul becomes in 
the world. The himian brain is but the instrument 
that expresses the soul as it works in the world in 
harmony with the great Cosmic plan. "There is one 
mind common to all individual men. Every man is 
an inlet to the same and to all of the same." 

The most cultivated men are the most moral ; the 
immorality of the geniuses of history may be prover- 
bial, but we are here referring to cultivated, en- 
lightened minds, with all-round development, and 
not to men of abnormal, but nevertheless, restricted 
mental powers. Cultivation of the mind and mental 
discipline result in self-control; excesses cause the 

91 



92 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

self-destruction of the intellectual forces and 
"weaken the springs of the mind." Plutarch tells 
us that there were two sentences inscribed upon the 
Delphic Oracle highly accommodated to the usage 
of man's life, "Know thyself," and "Nothing too 
much," and he adds, "upon them, all other precepts 
depend." The wisdom of knowing oneself is not 
subject to controversy. It is self-evident, yet its 
truth is generally accepted in an academical and not 
in a practical manner, in the abstract and not the 
concrete, and as applicable to mankind but not to 
the individual — the ego, whose tongue glibly slides 
over the words as the head wags approvingly. 

Mental self -analysis, as usually conducted by 
the individual, is a farce, a burlesque on scientific 
inquiry, a reflection upon human intelligence. It 
operates as a strong argument in favor of the de- 
pravity of the ego and its absolute dislike for truth 
and unadorned mind nakedness. Know thy present 
real self, by comparison with the ideal of thy yet 
better and truer self as seen from the divine point of 
view. To know oneself, man must needs follow the 
admonition of St. Augustine and "Go up into the 
tribunal of thy conscience and set thyself before thy- 
self." The soul becomes the judge, the will sym- 
bolizes the law, and the human mind, the prisoner 
at the bar. 

Protagoras and the subjectivistic Sophists be- 
lieved that if one would know the truth, he must de- 
rive it from a better source than his deceptive senses 
— "We must appeal to reflection and reason." They 
erred, however, in assuming that there are no uni- 
versal truth and reason, and in the belief that there 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 93 

are as many measures of the true and the false as 
there are individuals. When Protagoras said that 
man is the measure of all things, he referred to a 
changeable individual and did not consider that un- 
changing spiritual element which is common to all. 
He falsely asserted that goodness, justice and truth 
depend upon individual taste; with this theory, in- 
dividualistic whims are apt to be the sole and final 
judge. The criticism or skepticism of Protagoras 
destroyed the mental foundation of Polytheism and 
prepared the way for the spiritual reasoning philo- 
sophy or religion of Socrates, Plato, the Cynics and 
the Stoics ; but Protagoras himself failed to see that 
himian reason is essentially the same in all indivi- 
duals. Weber truly said that "Men hindered him 
from seeing man.'' 

Socrates commences where Protagoras stops. He 
feels that he knows nothing but believes that there 
is something in the universe that can be known and 
that absolutely; this something is man as is indi- 
cated by the words inscribed on the Temple of Del- 
phi, — Know Thyself. "We can never know exactly 
what is the nature of the world, its origin and its 
end, but we can know what we ourselves ought to 
be, what are the meanings and aims of life, the high- 
est good for the soul; and this knowledge alone is 
real and useful because it is the only possible knowl- 
edge. Outside of ethics there can be no serious 
philosophy." 

Socrates attempted to separate the general from 
the particular; he advanced from the individual to 
the universal, and again discovered beneath the in- 
finite variety of men, the one unchangeable man. 



94 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Beneath the confused mass of o pinions , held by a 
demoralized age, he finds the true and immutable 
opinion, the conscience of the human race, the law 
of minds. He brought mental order to a period of 
intellectual anarchy. He believed "that moral ideas 
are fundamental to humanity, that every human 
mind is big with truth, that education creates noth- 
ing that is not already there, but merely awakens 
and develops the latent germs of knowledge." As 
Weber says, the intimate relation which exists be- 
tween knowledge and will constitutes the funda- 
mental principle, and in a measure, the very soul of 
his philosophy. The essential thought is that the 
more a man thinks and knows, the better will he 
act ; that our moral value is directly proportioned to 
our light, that virtue is teachable, that no one is vol- 
untarily bad and that evil is the fruit of ignorance. 
He maintained that we can all attain to a knowl- 
edge of the highest good through the spirit within 
us, whose promptings function as an infallible inner 
sense. 

Socrates gave men an absolute, immutable and 
universal standard by which to judge and measure 
themselves, — one that must ever be unaffected by 
individual caprice. He vigorously protested against 
the popular, expressed view of the times, which af- 
firmed that good and evil are relative and that the 
rule for judging an act is not the "changing" law 
of conscience, but its success. Socrates stood for 
intellectual freedom and he urged men to reason, 
use and develop by exercise their divinely ordered 
brains ; analyze, weigh and measure themselves and 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 95 

sit in judgment upon their thoughts, words, acts and 
motives. 

The Shinto Shrines of Japan are conspicuously 
devoid of objects and instruments of worship, but 
a plain mirror, hung in the sanctuary, forms the 
essential part of its furnishings. When a person 
stands in front of the Shrine to worship, his own 
image is reflected on its shining surface and the act 
of worship is tantamount to the old Delphic injunc- 
tion, — "Know Thyself." Self-knowledge does not 
imply, either in the Japanese or the early Greek 
teachings, knowledge of the physical part of man, 
his anatomy or psycho-physics; knowledge is to be 
of a moral kind, the introspection of our moral na- 
ture, — that which affects the real inner man. The 
Japanese tell us that their temple mirror typifies the 
human heart, which, when perfectly placid and 
clear, reflects the very image of the Deity. 

After conforming with the tenet, "Know Thy- 
self," it would be fitting if the next command were, 
"Use Thyself," for no knowledge is worthy of the 
name if it is not potent enough to inspire action. 
Marcus Aurelius, writing his meditations in diary 
form and not intending that they should reach an- 
other's eyes, said, "Remember how long thou hast 
been putting off these things, and how often thou 
hast received an opportunity from the gods and yet 
dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of 
what universe thou art part, and of what administra- 
tion of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and 
that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which, if thou 
dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy 
mind, it will go and it will never return." This 



96 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

grand old Emperor, democratic, noble and peace- 
loving, who worked sixteen hours a day devoting 
himself to the just administration of a tremendous 
kingdom, also believed that a man's true greatness 
lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, 
founded on a just estimate of himself and every- 
thing else; on frequent self-examination and a 
steady obedience to the rule which he knows to be 
right, without troubling himself about what others 
may think or say, or whether they do, or do not do, 
that which he thinks and says and does. 

Wisdom does not only imply a correct apprecia- 
tion of the relative importance of things but it in- 
spires and demands action in harmony with such 
knowledge. Sir Thomas Browne said, "Every man 
truly lives so long as he acts his nature, or in some 
way makes good the faculties of himself/' An an- 
cient philosopher said, "If it is not right, do not do 
it; if it is not true, do not say it." We could, with 
profit, transpose this saying from the negative to 
the positive and substitute the admonition, "If a 
thing is right, do it ; if it is true, say it." To refram^ 
to excuse, to procrastinate and to abstain from ac- 
tion are, today, some of man's greatest psycholog- 
ical failings. What the world needs is not the re- 
fraining from evil and the avoiding of positive error, 
but the energetic, joyful and timely performance of 
good. Negative admonitions may have been highly 
esteemed ages ago, but what this generation needs 
is urging to constructive action: — Man, not only 
Know Thyself J but Use Thyself, 

The mind must be goaded by the will to have in- 
terest in a thing ; then mental application, persistent 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 97 

attention and interest beget knowledge, which, in 
turn, appreciates a need or perceives an opportunity 
for service and thus furnishes the mind with motive 
for action. Knowledge and indolence cannot oc- 
cupy the same nest and it is only ignorance mas- 
querading as knowledge that is willing to consort 
with inactivity and thus become or remain sterile 
and inert. A man who habitually thinks according 
to purpose, will speak, act and live according to 
purpose — ^the embodiment of living power. 

The second admonition of the Delphic Oracle, 
"Nothing too much," is suggestive of all-round de- 
velopment, with no part or quality fertilized, stimu- 
lated and exercised abnormally at the expense of 
any other part or to the detriment of a harmonious 
whole. A natural development is, of all things, most 
greatly to be desired. Mental discipline, directed 
by forceful will, functioning in parallel with the 
Cosmic Forces of progressive life, will cause the 
mind to reflect sanity, balance, poise and natural 
goodness. Many forces are said to be evil because 
they are undisciplined. Psychological powers which 
are unharnessed and uncontrolled cause dissipation 
of mental energy and lead to mediocrity and error. 
A virtue carried to an extreme in either direction be- 
comes a vice, just as a normal rainfall benefits all 
life, but a prolonged drought or flood, kills. A 
moderate heat, as furnished by the sun in a Temper- 
ate Zone, sustains with comfort ; but an intense cold 
or an extreme heat, kills. We feed our bodies to 
maintain life, but if we eat and drink gluttonously, 
our systems are unduly stressed, harassed and 
poisoned, instead of being nourished and strength- 



98 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

ened. Abstinence from food will cause death, but 
so will senseless gorging. Physical exercise is 
healthful ; an absolute lack of it results in the loss of 
the use of the parts of the body ignored; whereas 
exercise and muscular activity to excess and beyond 
the limit of body endurance, result in fatigue, col- 
lapse, and if carried to an extreme — death. 

Fear of disease with its psychological impairment 
and lowering of the bodily resistance, is an expres- 
sion of error. On the other hand, indifference to the 
laws of hygiene and sanitation and refusal to take 
precautions suggested by science to protect oneself 
and one's fellows, are also indicative of error; — 
virtue lies only in the middle course. Aristotle ex- 
pressed this same basic thought when he said that 
virtue is the mean between two extremes, each of 
which should be considered a bad quality, i e., cour- 
age between timidity and foolhardiness, truthful- 
ness between self -depreciation and boastfulness and 
liberality between avarice and prodigality. He also 
affirmed that "Virtue appears personified in the 
'true gentleman' who ever avoids extremes." 

Pindar, the Greek poet of the fifth century B. C, 
praised Lampon of Aegina for "pursuing the mean 
with his thought and maintaining it in his acts," and, 
in so doing, recalled the principle laid down much 
earlier in Hesiod's verse, "Keep a middle course; 
the seasonable in all things is best." A fanatic in 
any hne of human interest and endeavor is an ex- 
ponent of over-stimulated virtue, devitalized and 
gone-to-seed ; a miser is a thrifty and frugal econo- 
mist and conservator, who has lost his bearing and 
his sense of proportion and relative values. A luna- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 99 

tic is often a person with unanchored mind, who has 
expended energy in senseless and persistent wan- 
dering in an uncharted psychological country, a 
labyrinth of hopelessness, and has severed his con- 
nection with substantial and tenable verities, — such 
a mind has flown off tangent into space. 

Plato (427-347 B.C.), "the Homer of the Philos- 
ophers," was the ablest exponent of the true mind of 
Socrates and one of the most brilliant of Greek 
thinkers. He maintained that the four cardinal vir- 
tues are Wisdom (Reasoning Soul), Courage 
(Emotional Soul), Soberness (Appetitive Soul) 
and Justice — ^the supreme virtue which assigns to 
each its proper function. The high position assigned 
to Justice leads up to the practical doctrine of mod- 
eration, and as E. Vernon Arnold says, even the 
virtues are restricted both in their intensity and in 
their spheres of work, and if any virtue passes its 
proper limit it becomes changed into the vice that 
borders on it. "Thus the ideal of practical life is 
the moderate man, calm, considerate and self-re- 
specting, touched with a warm flow of feeling but 
never carried away into excitement; and even this 
ideal is strictly subordinate to that of the life of 
philosophic contemplation." 

Growth and development are vital processes. 
They are the expression of evolution and should 
show themselves, not in the defiance of Cosmic Law, 
but in the marshaling and harne§sing of unorgan- 
ized forces into definite forms of harmony and util- 
ity. An abnormal growth in one direction, if at- 
tained at the expense of other parts, may lead not 
only to lopsided ugliness but to defiance of nature 



100 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

with retributive failure and death. Life itself is 
growth, but it is growth in conformity with Law, — 
an ever-changing, evolving movement attracted to 
and progressing toward an ideal. Wherever life 
exists there also is growth in some direction; the 
suspension of the process of growth heralds the 
commencement of decay and degeneration. 

It has been argued that virtue is always positive 
and vice negative, and to illustrate this conclusion 
it is affirmed that one cannot have too much good- 
ness. Ancient philosophers appreciated the virtue 
of the mean, i. e., the avoidance of the extreme, or, 
as the Delphic Oracle said, "Nothing too much," but 
today we are apt to see one well-trodden side of a 
question and ignore the other. What is "goodness"? 
We speak of a good machinist, a good father, a good 
violinist, but we also speak of a good dog, and even 
refer to inanimate things, as good food, good tools, 
good materials. Goodness is apparently being or 
acting according to nature. Each has a peculiar 
function and goodness means that it is to be per- 
formed well, i. e., in harmony with Cosmic Law, 
evolution, or natural growth. This force is what the 
ancient Greeks termed "Phusis." It was to them 
a power present throughout all the world which con- 
tinually expressed itself in making things grow to- 
ward the fulfilment of their utmost capacity. As 
Gilbert Murray has said in his lecture on the Stoic 
Philosophy, "Phusis gradually shapes, or tries to 
shape, every living thing into a more perfect form. 
It shapes the seed, by infinite and exact graduation, 
into the oak ; the blind puppy into the good hunting 
dog; the savage tribe into the civilized city." This 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 101 

power, call it what you will, Phusis, Evolution, or 
God, strives to make one live according to his na- 
ture, not primitively or necessarily simply, but in 
harmony with the spirit which makes the world 
grow and progress. 

Goodness is expressed by living and working with 
Cosmic Forces in their eternal effort toward achieve- 
ment and perfection. To be good, man must use his 
faculties and perform his functions well. It is, 
therefore, immoral to ignore inherent mental capa- 
bilities, to dechne to exercise and develop endowed 
forces ; — the mentally lazy and indolent cannot pos- 
sibly be "good." To unduly stimulate growth in 
one direction to the detriment of other equally im- 
portant parts of the brain, must also be immoral, for 
disuse and atrophy of nature's creations and instru- 
ments of service are antagonistic to Cosmic Law. 
"Goodness" is the efficient and thorough use of one's 
faculties for the benefit of mankind and civilization ; 
it requires a knowledge or inventory of relative 
values and of Universal Law. 

The world advances to perfection by law. Hu- 
manity will progress to perfection and to ideal man- 
hood, and every cause throughout life produces an 
effect as an absolute and unerring reaction. Success 
is the measure of goodness, and morality is only sat- 
isfied with success. The good farmer is not the one 
who raises poor crops. The good engineer is not 
the one who builds structures which promptly col- 
lapse. The good navigator does not run his vessel 
on well-charted rocks. The good doctor is not the 
one who kills his patients. The good cook does not 
prepare indigestible food; neither is the good man 



102 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

the one who misses living the good hf e. Henderson 
has said that "Failure is only another name for im- 
morality, and human failure means human immor- 
ahty." He also affirms that "the absence of health, 
wisdom, accomphshment and lovableness is a moral 
delinquency." 

In dealing, however, directly with an individual 
rather than with the individual plus his ancestry, 
we must admit that there are phases of health and 
physical limitations which are congenital. Mental 
capabilities, talents and tendencies vary with defin- 
ite restrictions in every man, yet after all, the indi- 
vidual is generally to blame for most of his iUness 
and resultant physical shortcomings, and is directly 
responsible for the non-development or non-use of 
his mental faculties. A man is immoral if he has 
stifled or deadened that inherent and natural im- 
pulse toward perfection which alone makes human 
life significant and divine. A physically perfect 
man is not moral if he has neglected his mind, soul 
and social instincts. A wonderful scholar is not 
moral if he has starved his nature so that love and 
sympathy are foreign to him. There is no such 
thing as attainment to perfected morality, for a 
moral life demands motion and activity, the exercise 
of mind, the making of decisions, the overcoming of 
resistance and the accomplishment of new and hard 
things. 

God is not an arbitrary, vacillating creature, up- 
setting natural order, but the will of God is un- 
changing, immutable law — "What a man sows that 
shall he also reap." Goodness is realized by making 
good the faculties within oneself; by Hving, grow- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 103 

ing, developing according to nature; by traversing 
the straight line towards the goal, refusing to wan- 
der off to the left or the right, no matter how allur- 
ing the attractions, and no matter how an ignorant 
world, dominated by mortal mind, may decree that 
goodness or virtue exists on the right and badness 
or evil abounds on the left. 

The opinions of the world constantly change. 
What the world brands as good and moral today, 
may be denounced as bad and evil several centuries 
hence, and much that was considered virtue cen- 
turies ago, is now scathingly condemned. The Law 
of Nature, i. e., the Law of God, never changes or 
varies one iota — it exists for eternity — the one fixed 
power in life. The law of man is no law at all but 
is simply a blind scrambling for a vestige of truth, 
that can be dogmatized and temporarily used, until 
he can appreciate and use something better. Noth- 
ing tends so much to disgust men with the world's 
standard of goodness as the hoUowness and artifici- 
ality of what is palmed off on them for goodness. 
Rochefoucauld said, "We are so much accustomed 
to disguise ourselves to others, that at length we 
disguise ourselves to ourselves — our virtues are gen- 
erally only disguised vices." Reasoning and analyt- 
ical men are so repeatedly disappointed in their 
search for reality and so accustomed to see mean 
and debased principles masquerading as virtue and 
goodness that they are often led to doubt the exist- 
ence of moral goodness. It is this feeling and these 
most regrettable and erroneous conclusions, often 
evidenced by philosophical minds of our day, that 
are embodied in the bitter exclamation of an old 



104 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Roman, — "Virtue, I have worshipped thee as a real 
God, but at length I find thee an empty name." 

Virtue can only spring from inherent goodness 
and truth. It is not like a chemical of a relatively 
low degree of purity, which has to be repeatedly 
sent back into the process to be further and further 
purified, until, after the elimination of its dross, it 
can be justly branded as "chemically pure;" but vir- 
tue springs full grown to light, like Minerva from 
the head of Jupiter. An act is either good or it is 
not good. If it conforms to Cosmic Law and one's 
higher nature, for the expression of which man was 
created, then it must be good. "Let us never grow 
tired of repeating that good and great things are 
only born of a good and great purpose." To consti- 
tute a virtuous action, a virtuous motive is abso- 
lutely essential, and unfortunately, much that may 
bear an external resemblance to virtue, upon an 
examination of the motive behind the act, becomes 
deserving of censure rather than commendation. 
Any insincere, unreal, unsocial, inconsiderate, ego- 
tistic or pernicious act cannot be inspired by good- 
ness, and "Nothing depreciates a sound coinage 
more than the existence of well-executed counter- 
feits." To be sound is to be good. 

The world needs the whole man, all there is of 
the real man, and wants him always at his best. 
Haddock has well said, "The nature of things makes 
it law that a man shall endeavor to make the most 
of himself in every way which is not inimical to 
soundness. This is the first principle of holiness — 
wholeness — soundness," and such a fundamental 
principle expressed in conduct becomes that service 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 105 

for which the world has an ever crying need. The 
world is ruled by its servants. The successful ser- 
vant is king. Goodness, according to man's stand- 
ards and human judgment, may be pronounced er- 
ror, but goodness, according to Cosmic Law, is a 
virtue, incontrovertible and unchanging. It is evi- 
dent, therefore, that goodness is the full and free 
use within oneself of the self -evolving power planted 
therein by nature. 

Mental development is, therefore, a moral as well 
as an economic force, and the happiness which comes 
from achievement and the efficient utiHzation of 
one's forces is the just fruit and the reward for 
work. The true worker and brain user works for 
the joy of work and to fulfil his destiny. He knows 
not what the soul will encounter in the great space 
beyond, he cares not for the promised "reward of 
the faithful." He knows that if he hves according 
to nature, utilizes all his talents and gives a good ac- 
count of his stewardship in this life, the reaction 
will give him happiness here and it cannot grow less 
in the life beyond. The efficient brain user does not 
speculate for a high rate of interest to be paid at a 
later date ; he is not working to accumulate a fund 
which will be paid back to him as an annuity 
throughout eternity, but he receives his recompense 
here in functioning according to nature and he 
knows that in the life beyond happiness will exist, 
and true happiness is dependent for its very exist- 
ence upon activity and the accomplishment of some 
meritorious thing or other. "The essence of good- 
ness," said Murray, "is to do something, to labor, to 
achieve some end," and if goodness and happiness 



106 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

are to exist throughout eternity, the world processes 
must continue or be replaced with other processes, in 
complexity probably far beyond human ken. 

Life is like the game of chess and the business of 
our will is to play the game in the right way and in 
accordance with the rules, using the pieces, many or 
few, with which the board is originally set ; discern- 
ing the quality, value and possible moves of each 
piece, King, Queen, Knight, Bishop, Rook and 
Pawns, and using them according to their nature in 
order that the greatest results may be achieved. 
The great creative power of all Hfe may have given 
us many pieces, or few ; we may have valuable pieces 
or almost all pawns; probably none of us is fur- 
nished with the complete sixteen pieces, but our 
duty is to make the most of what we have and play 
the game. When our initial equipment is so varia- 
ble, we surely cannot be judged in life by our rela- 
tive and apparent failure or success. "Life is not 
the holding of a good hand but the playing of a poor 
hand well." Whether we win or lose by worldly 
standards, what does it matter, provided we have 
played the game every minute to win and made the 
most of our hereditary endowment? It is our play 
that tells and not the score that we happen to make. 
Victory is with the man who fights best and not 
necessarily with him who happens to win the world's 
laurel wreath ; no one is the worse for being beaten 
if his faith remains firm and his courage undaunted. 

"To set the cause above renown, 
To love the game beyond the prize." 

The successful man is he who expresses himself, 
and all his innate powers and possibihties, most 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 107 

fully and completely to the world. Fate may seem 
to clear the board and stun the player, but if the 
game is played fairly, earnestly and enthusiastic- 
ally, our souls are developed. Our three score years 
and ten are but as a flash in the sky compared with 
the eternity of Cosmic Effort and the progress of 
the spirit of man. 

"Suppose," said Huxley, "it were perfectly cer- 
tain that the life and fortune of every one of us 
would, one day or other, depend upon his winning 
or losing a game of chess. Don't you think that we 
should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn 
at least the names and the moves of the pieces ? Do 
you not think that we should look with disapproba- 
tion, amounting to scorn, upon the one who allowed 
himself to grow up without knowing a Pawn from 
a Knight? Yet it is a very plain and elementary 
truth that the life, the fortune and the happiness of 
every one of us, and more or less of those who are 
connected with us, do depend upon our knowing 
something of the rules of a game infinitely more 
difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game 
which has been played for untold ages, every man 
and woman of us being one of the two players in a 
game of his or her own. The chess board is the 
world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Uni- 
verse, the rules of the game are what we call the 
laws of nature. The player on the other side is hid- 
den from us. We know that His play is always fair, 
just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, 
that He never overlooks a mistake or makes the 
smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who 
plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that 



108 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

sort of overflowing generosity which, with the 
strong, shows delight in strength. And the one who 
plays ill is checkmated — without haste, but without 
remorse." 

Are we playing the game of life or is it playing 
us? If a man's mind continually wanders to the 
reward of the game, and if he works merely for 
money here and a heaven beyond, then life is play- 
ing him, but if he works for love and the joy of do- 
ing, he plays the game well. Playing the game for 
its own sake — that is happiness. All other rewards 
are but pleasant by-products. Emerson said, "The 
reward of a thing well done, is to have done it." A 
man who dodges work and not only neglects but de- 
clines to see opportunities, who functions with his 
spinal cord instead of his brain, is a Pawn upon the 
board in the great game of life. Such a man does 
no more than he has to and never all that he can; 
he, therefore, automatically functions and bhndly 
participates in the nothingness of a sterile occupa- 
tion. He voluntarily brands himself as a Pawn, 
the world takes him at his own valuation, and a 
Pawn he remains until he is swept as a failure into 
oblivion. 

Life can be likened to any game that requires 
skiU and encounters resistance. James Tvson, the 
Australian Bushman Milhonaire, when asked about 
his remarkable career and accumulation of wealth, 
said that his life had been a game with the great 
desert for his adversary. "I have been fighting the 
desert all my life and I have won. Water has been 
put where there was no water, beef where there was 
no beef, fences where there were no fences, and 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 109 

roads where there were no roads. Nothing can 
undo what has been done and miUions of people will 
be happier for it after I am long dead and for- 
gotten." 

Epictetus said that if a man enters into the game 
of life, he should train for the resistance which will 
be inevitably experienced in the encounter and be 
prepared for all events and set-backs. If a man 
does not bear adversity and opposition philosophic- 
ally, he is "like an athlete who, after receiving a 
blow, should quit the combat cold, exhibiting cow- 
ardice," instead of redoubling his efforts to retrieve 
his position and again become aggressive. What he 
should say upon such an occasion is, "It was for this 
I exercised; it was for this that I trained myself." 
And in regard to the life of a reasoning being, an 
individual, a philosopher, he likened it to participa- 
tion in the Olympic Games, saying, "Consider what 
precedes and what follows. You must conform to 
rules, submit to a diet, refrain from enervating lux- 
uries, exercise your body, whether you choose it or 
not, at a stated hour, in heat or cold — ^in a word, you 
must give yourself up to your trainer as to a physi- 
cian. Then in the combat you may be thrown into 
a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swal- 
low an abundance of dust, and, after all, lose the 
victory. Do you think that you can act as you do 
and be a philosopher ; that you can eat and drink in- 
temperately, be angry, be discontented, as you now 
are? You must watch, you must labor, you must 
get the better of certain appetites — you must part 
with much if you have a mind to purchase serenity, 
freedom and tranquillity." 



110 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Life is a game with oneself, with one's fellows, 
and with the world. It is a game of individuals and 
a game between teams, all in harmony with Cosmic 
Purpose and nature's plan to stimulate achievement. 
In contests between individuals, it is a test of mental 
forces — not one quality or inherent faculty, but the 
many. A golfer goes over the course in 90, and 
strives to do it in 88, then in 86 ; he works to improve 
himself with his own record of achievement as the 
set goal. In a match at golf, or tennis singles, the 
object is to do better than your adversary. In foot- 
ball, or baseball, we fight for the team, every man 
doing his utmost, but self is subordinated for the 
good of the side on which one plays. Each type of 
game has its counterpart in hf e, and every man with 
red blood in his veins has the desire to succeed, to 
excel, to win. Confucius covered the prime thought 
of a desire for superiority, and particularly the 
praiseworthy and easily realizable desire to improve 
oneself, when he said, "The central idea is that every 
normal human being cherishes the aspiration to be- 
come a superior man — superior to his fellows, if 
possible, but surely superior to his own past and 
present self" 

If Confucius had lived in this century he would 
have had to admit that normal beings are a woefully 
small part of mankind, for in these days the average 
man is ambitious for power and wealth, but not 
necessarily for inner and true superiority; he cares 
httle for growth, improvement or achievement un- 
less it increases his salary check, gives him more 
time to waste and an opportunity to acquire and 
worship more artificialities and those externals to 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 111 

which his fellows begrudgingly, but nevertheless re- 
ligiously, do homage. Speaking further of superi- 
ority and the real predominance of mind and the 
inner man over all externals, Confucius said, "What 
the superior man seeks is within himself; what the 
ordinary man seeks is in others. The progress of 
the superior man is upward; the progress of the 
ordinary man is downward. When one cultivates 
to the utmost the capabilities of his nature and exer- 
cises them on the principles of reciprocity, he is not 
far from the path. From the highest to the lowest, 
self-development must be deemed the root of all by 
every man. When the root is neglected it cannot 
be that what springs from it will be well ordered." 

Intellectual achievement, cultivation, and that 
superiority which comes from knowledge and good- 
ness and is expressive of the highest attributes of 
man, can be likened to a long wedge. The thin end 
is entered at our birth, under that part of the world 
we are destined to have the opportunity of trying 
to move, and throughout our life we are expected 
to keep continually and persistently hammering en- 
ergetically at the wedge, forcing it further and 
further into the world, to raise the mass a trifle and 
bring more and more of our own selves in contact 
with the forces of life. The deeper we drive the 
wedge, the greater our power, the greater our in- 
fluence, and the greater our work ; the depth of the 
bearing wedge is a fitting index of our growth and 
our attainment in the great school and workshop of 
hfe. 



VI 

THE cry of man vibrating through the ages has 
been for freedom. In the early era of tradi- 
tion it was for freedom from the physical 
domination of others; but even then he enjoyed 
greater freedom of thought and more distinct men- 
tal individuality than his successors who lived in the 
early Christian and mediaeval days. Before sacer- 
dotalism became dominant, the Medicine Man and 
Pagan Priest had great influence, and superstition 
was rampant, but still a man might enjoy freedom 
of thought and freedom of speech in a measure far 
beyond that of our later forefathers of the Middle 
Ages, and if he so willed it, he could enjoy mental 
freedom in its fullness. 

True mental freedom really dates from the period 
when philosophers, such as Thales, Xenophanes, 
and Pythagoras, whom Aristotle termed "Physi- 
cians" (in distinction from their predecessors, the 
"Theologians"), relegated the traditional gods and 
their functions to the domain of fable and explained 
nature by principles and causes. Could there be 
more real freedom of individualistic thought in the 
midst of a self-satisfied, intractable and unthinking 
humanity than was enjoyed by the ancient philoso- 
phers of Greece, Rome and the East.* 



*Zoroaster, of antiquity, Xenophanes (580-488 B.C.), Buddha 
(568-488 B. C), Confucius (552-479 B. C), Heraclitus (540-475 B.C.), 
Democritus (465-375 B.C.), Plato (427-347 B.C.), Diogenes, the 
Cynic (412-323 B. C), Aristotle (384-322 B. C), Zeno (350-260 B. C), 
Cleanthes (331-232 B.C.), Seneca (4 B. C.-65 A. D.), Epictetus 
(50-130 A.D.), Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.), etc. 



113 



114 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

In those days, social position with worldly power 
had little, if any, influence upon a man's freedom 
and expression of thought, for Marcus Aurelius was 
a Roman Emperor, while Epictetus was a lame 
Phrygian Greek slave, "maimed in body, an Irus in 
poverty, '* the property of an unworthy master. 
This philosopher-slave knew full well what physical 
torture was, — his leg was broken by his master in 
an exhibition of unwarranted cruelty, but he en- 
joyed that sublime freedom of mind and soul which 
caused him to say, "Look at me, who am without a 
city, without a house, without possessions, without 
a servant ; I sleep on the ground ; I have no wife, no 
children, no praetorium, but only the earth and the 
heavens and one shabby cloak. And what do I 
want? Am I not without sorrow? Am I not with- 
out fear? Am I not free? When did any of you 
see me failing in the object of my desire or even fall- 
ing into that which I would avoid? Did I ever 
blame God or man? Did I ever accuse any man? 
Did you ever see me with a sorrowful countenance?" 
Although bound in body and the despised chattel of 
a despicable freedman, surrounded by every de- 
pressing, ignoble and pitiable circumstance of life, 
Epictetus was free in soul, mind, thought and 
speech. He denounced materialism and the wor- 
ship of externals and never hesitated at any time to 
express the opinions and workings of his wonderful, 
free and unfettered mind. "There is only one 
thing," he said, "which is fully our ovm, — that is 
our will and no man can rob us of our free will." 
On another occasion he said, "You may put my body 
into prison, but my mind not even Zeus himself can 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 115 

overpower." The philosophy of Epictetus is in- 
tensely practical and exhibits a high idealistic type 
of morality. He was an earnest advocate of right- 
eousness and mental freedom, despising the oppres- 
sions of soulless custom and the subtleties of an ab- 
struse logic. 

When Imperial Rome held sway, many men of 
servile origin rose to positions of eminence and 
leadership. In the great slave households, we are 
told that unequalled opportunities lay open to tal- 
ent, and the educational ladder was everywhere set 
up to encourage the youth to make the most of his 
inherent capabiUties and rise to greater responsibili- 
ties. Plato said that we cannot find a king who is 
not descended from a slave, or a slave who is not de- 
scended from a king, and an ancient writer attrib- 
uted to a discriminating philosopher the remark that 
many a Roman slave was far better educated than 
his master. 

The Emperor Claudius chose his ministers among 
his freedmen, "provoking thereby the sneers of the 
Roman aristocracy, but greatly advancing the good 
government of the Roman Empire." Vespasian, 
the Roman Emperor from 70 to 79 A. D., and 
father of the Emperors Titus and Domitian, was 
born 9 A. D. in the Sabine Country near Reate, the 
son of a plebeian tax collector. By his personal ex- 
ample of simphcity of life, he put to shame the lux- 
ury and extravagance of the Roman Nobles and 
initiated a marked improvement in the general tone 
of society. Vespasian was a plain, blunt soldier with 
great ability, steady purpose and strong character. 
He worked with success to establish good order in 



116 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

a morally decadent empire, and his prime thought 
was to secure the highest welfare and prosperity of 
his subjects. He did not object to criticism, saying, 
"I will not kill a dog because he barks at me.'* 

Cornutus, the African (20-66 A. D.) , author and 
philosopher, and the teacher of the poets Persius 
and Lucan, entered the house of Annaei as a slave. 
Phaedrus, the Roman fabuhst, and a contemporary 
of Christ, was a slave, freed later by Augustine. 
Epictetus, in days of physical slavery, rose to prom- 
inence and, in mature years, to freedom. The cele- 
brated playwright, Terence, was brought to Rome 
as a Carthaginian slave. He was emancipated by 
his master, Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, 
because he showed literary and philosophical skill. 
Terence, the slave, was admitted, because of his tal- 
ent in writing, to the intimacy of learned patricians, 
such as Scipio, Laelius, and Furius Pilus. It has 
been said of Terence, "No writer in any literature 
who has contented himself with so limited a func- 
tion, has gained so great a reputation." The limita- 
tion here mentioned probably refers to a short 
period of life, presumably ended by shipwreck, as 
we have no authentic record of him after he was 
about twenty-five years of age. 

Marcus Porcius Cato, "the Elder", or the Censor 
(234-149 B. C.) , came of a plebeian family and was 
bred to agriculture, an occupation despised in those 
days. He became a great statesman, philosopher, 
and soldier and, notwithstanding his prosperity and 
power, was always the foe of luxury and lived con- 
sistently, the advocate of the Simple Life. When 
asked, during a period when boastfulness and self- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 117 

praise were being commonly expressed in the erec- 
tion of monmnents, why so many Romans had stat- 
ues raised to their honor, whereas he, much more 
worthy, had none, Cato rephed, "I would much 
rather men should wonder and ask why Cato had no 
statue than why he had a statue." 

In the earlier days of Greek pre-eminence, Persa- 
cus, of Citium (300-243 B. C), noted Philosopher 
and General in command of the Acropolis at Cor- 
inth, was a personal servant of Zeno, but later rose 
to be his intimate companion and fellow lodger, 
prior to entering the service of Antigonus Gonatas, 
King of Macedonia. Cleanthes (331-232 B. C), 
the successor of Zeno as head of the Stoic School, 
was of very humble origin. He was the poet and 
theologian of the Stoics, and in his "Hymn to Zeus" 
wrote, 

"From ignorance deliver us, that leads 
The Sons of Men to sorrow and to shame. 
WTierefore dispel it, Father, from the soul 
And grant that Wisdom may our life control." 

Iphicrates, the great Athenian General who 
flourished in the early part of the fourth century 
B. C, was a learned man and the son of a poor and 
very humble shoemaker. He was a genius in devis- 
ing fighting equipment and accoutrements and his 
mihtary successes were remarkable. When Har- 
modius, who boasted of direct descent from the an- 
cient Harmodius of fame, reviled Iphicrates for his 
mean birth, the latter replied, "My nobility, it ap- 
pears by worldly standards, seems to begin in me, 
but yours has ended before or in you." 

Solon (638-558 B. C), Athenian Statesman and 



118 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

great Law-giver, born a poor boy, was compelled to 
maintain himself from early childhood. The prod- 
igality and habits of his father drove the boy, at 
times, to dire distress, yet his genius trimnphed 
over great discouragements and overwhelming 
odds. In his early youth he wrote poems, and in 
later life became one of the world's most learned 
and honored men. Solon has been known through 
the ages as one of the Seven Sages. 

Hesiod (8th Century B. C.) , the father of Greek 
didactic poetry, was a humble shepherd. Cyrus the 
Great was of lowly and humble origin; from a 
soldier and statesman he rose to be the founder of 
the great Persian Empire and was crowned, in 538 
B. C, King of Babylon and of the countries of the 
world. One ancient writer said that he was the son 
of Atradates, a poor Mardian bandit ; another main- 
tains that he was the son of a poor Persian shepherd, 
and all authorities agree that he rose from a mem- 
ber of an obscure Nomadic Persian tribe to be the 
founder of a great world Empire. 

Diogenes was the son of an unscrupulous swin- 
dler ; he was sold as a slave in Crete to Xeniades, a 
Corinthian. Being asked his trade, he replied that 
he knew no trade but that of governing men and 
that he wished to be sold to a man who needed a 
master. Diogenes preached the doctrine of virtuous 
self-control. Virtue for him counted in the pursuit 
of that which is good and lasting and in the avoid- 
ance of so-called physical pleasures. He maintained 
that all the artificial growths of society appeared to 
be incompatible with truth and goodness, and that 
morahzation implies a return to nature, reality and 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 119 

simplicity. Diogenes, the virtuous philosopher, pos- 
sessed a God-like will and complete mastery over 
bodily appetites; by a strange coincidence, he died 
in his ninetieth year, on the same day that Alexan- 
der, in his thirty-third year, died as a result of dis- 
sipation. 

At one of the Isthmian Games, it is said that 
Diogenes craved from Alexander the single boon 
that he, with his military triumphs, would not stand 
between him and the sun, to which Alexander re- 
plied, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Dioge- 
nes." Which was the greater, the Emperor or the 
slave; the soldier or the philosopher; the brilliant 
mind, poisoned by bacchanalian excesses of the de- 
bauchee, or the still grander mind that controlled 
the appetites of the lower nature and regulated the 
utilization of inherent forces for the highest ultimate 
good of the individual and society; the man who 
murdered in passion or the man who loved all his 
fellow men ; the man who conquered and ruled most 
of the world, but never himself, or the slave who 
absolutely ruled himself? 

After Alexander's death, his Kingdom, founded 
on the sword, soon lost its glory and power ; it was 
split up and passed away ; its existence, the fruit of 
ambition and avarice, had caused much suffering 
and given the world no semblance of lasting bene- 
fit. Diogenes influenced for eternity the thought of 
the world ; he was a man of lofty ethical ideals, keen 
human sympathies and a persistent, honest searcher 
after truth. Four hundred and sixty years later, 
and at a period when the records of great men were 
quickly lost, Epictetus said of him, "Diogenes was 



120 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

so kind and so much a lover of all, that for mankind 
in general he willingly undertook much labor and 
bodily suffering. All the earth was his country, and 
not one particular place; when he was taken pris- 
oner he did not regret Athens nor his associates and 
friends there, but he even became familiar with the 
pirates and tried to improve them ; being sold after- 
wards, he lived in Corinth as before at Athens. Thus 
is freedom acquired." Diogenes, the slave, and not 
the arrogant Alexander, truly conquered the world. 

If, in the days of slavery, when men owned their 
kind and were owned by their fellows, youths, by 
sheer perseverance, work and ambition, utilizing 
their innate forces, rose from the humblest ranks to 
positions of intellectual eminence as dominant men- 
tal powers, and sometimes attained positions of au- 
thority with great worldly power, how can one say 
in these days of freedom that any door to progress 
and achievement is barred against him, if he has the 
talent or embryonic power to develop his forces with 
energy and purpose and use them with persistent 
and earnest determination? 

The life of the noblest so-called Pagan Emperor, 
Marcus Aurelius, closely followed that of Epictetus, 
the noblest of Pagan slaves, and he is our last great 
authority and example of Roman stoicism and an- 
cient philosophy. Epictetus proved that a slave, 
because of mental freedom, could live a life of the 
loftiest exaltation amidst the most sordid surround- 
ings ; Marcus Aurelius, commonly spoken of as "the 
Philosopher upon the Throne," demonstrated that 
an Emperor, enjoying the same freedom from tra- 
ditional and conventional thought, though born to 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 121 

the purple, could live a life of simplicity, virtue, 
service and humility, expressing continually in his 
daily life the most admirable justice, tempered with 
mercy and tenderness, 

"What is that which is able to conduct a man?" 
said Marcus Aurelius. "One thing and only one — 
philosophy (the love of and search after truth). 
This consists in keeping the spirit within a man 
free; of doing nothing without a purpose, yet not 
falsely and with hypocrisy and not feehng the need 
of another man's doing or not doing anything. If 
thou workest at that which is before thee, following 
right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without 
allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping 
thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound 
to give it back immediately ; if thou boldest to this, 
expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied 
with thy present activity, according to nature, and 
with heroic truth in every word and sound which 
thou utterest, thou wilt be happy. And there is no 
man who is able to prevent this/' 

Xenophanes, of Colophon, born 580 B. C, has 
been called the "Voltaire of Greece," and like Vol- 
taire, this ancient free thinker lived to a great age. 
Rather than submit to the Persians, after the fall 
of Ionia, he adopted the life of a wandering min- 
strel, and finally settled in Elea, in Lower Italy. 
Xenophanes poured forth a multitude of controver- 
sial works, attacked the Homeric gods, and force- 
fully and persistently declared that the truth should 
be made known to all. "There is one God, the great- 
est among Gods and men, not like mortal man in 
bodily shape or in mind." Xenophanes boldly 



122 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

taught what was generally considered heresy and, 
as Winwood Reade says, "His views were, no doubt, 
distasteful to the vulgar crowd by whom he was 
surrounded ; and even to cultivated and imaginative 
minds which were sunk in sentimental idolatry, 
blinded by the splendour of the Homeric poems. 
He was, however, in no way interfered with, re- 
ligious persecution being unknown in the Greek 
world, except at Athens." 

The Athenians objected to the expression of 
untrammeled thought and the searching for truth 
by absolute freedom in discussion and argumenta- 
tion, for such was the practice outside of Athens, 
and Athens was too proud and self-satisfied to 
follow where others led. They objected to the loni- 
ans calling their sun a mass of red-hot iron and their 
gods mere creatures of a poet's fancy, so when one 
of their prophets, a man of strong imaginative 
powers which had not been calmed and guided by 
education, — a compound of self -ordained prophet 
and politician, shrilly uttered condemnatory oracles, 
they passed a decree that "All who denied the reli- 
gion of the city or who philosophized in matters 
appertaining to the gods, should be indicted as 
state criminals." Damon and Anaxagoras were 
banished, the tears of the great Pericles were neces- 
sary to save Aspasia; Socrates was put to death; 
Plato, his pupil, had at times to be politic in his 
utterances; and Aristotle, the greatest of Plato's 
followers, preferred unchartered freedom out of 
Athens to partial restraint within. And yet, 
throughout the Hellenic world, toleration was the 
universal rule and an Oracle at Delphi had ex- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 123 

pressed the opinion of the Greeks when it declared 
that "the proper religion for each man was the reli- 
gion of his fatherland," and analysis, freedom of 
thought and toleration were advocated as virtues. 

Socrates (born 4*69 B. C.) taught that all popu- 
lar beUefs should be brought before the bar of 
reason; that every inquiry should be approached 
with a free and open mind and no decision rendered 
by the individual should be blindly formed by the 
popular opinions of the majority or influenced by 
the dictates of authority external to his own mind. 
He possessed the art of persuasive reasoning which 
stimulated his followers to be not only wiser, but 
better men. He advocated definition and the prac- 
tice of induction, which make larger the outlook of 
the mind and lead to truth. He maintained that if 
a man would accustom himself to think with delib- 
eration, to look upon the httle in its relation to the 
great, and attune himself to the divine will, he would 
go out into the world strengthened in self-restraint, 
in argumentative and constructive power and in 
active good-will to his fellow men. 

Socrates has given the world an example of a life 
of activity, geniality, kindly tolerance and self-con- 
trol ; and by his character, as well as by his specula- 
tions, he has exercised a wholesome, inspiring influ- 
ence that has not only reached us, who have followed 
him over twenty-three centuries later, — but will 
continue to affect for good the generations yet un- 
born. Cicero says that "Socrates called philosophj^ 
down from the heavens to earth and introduced it 
into the houses and cities of men, compelhng men to 
enquire concerning life and morals and things good 



124 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

and evil," and Seneca wrote that he "recalled the 
whole of philosophy to moral questions and said 
that the supreme wisdom was to distinguish between 
good and evil." 

Socrates set his fellow citizens an example of the 
vigorous performance of duty. As a soldier, he was 
brave and took part in three campaigns. As a 
magistrate, he discharged his duty unflinchingly, 
refusing on one momentous occasion and under 
great stress, to yield to the demands of the mob. 
When Athens was under the rule of the Thirty, 
Socrates again stood boldly against the wishes of 
the Rulers and the majority, and firmly refused to 
obey unjust orders. When condemned to death, a 
fate he might so easily have avoided that it seemed 
almost to be self-chosen, he refused to embrace an 
opportunity for flight which was given him, for this, 
he said, "would be to disobey the laws of his coun- 
try." 

After seventy years of useful living, Socrates 
died, drinking the State's poison cup of hemlock 
rather than compromise with politics. He scorned 
the exercise of diplomacy and would not bend his 
stately will, knowingly, to any error. Socrates was 
not an unwilling martyr to freedom of thought, but 
he undoubtedly was a victim of the depravity of 
politics and jealousy; the charges against him were 
that he disbelieved in the Athenian gods, that he 
introduced new deities and that he corrupted the 
youth of the city. Of his three accusers, one was a 
poet, another an orator and all were members of 
the so-called Patriot Party. At his trial, Socrates 
said, "If you purpose to acquit me on condition that 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 125 

I abandon my search for truth, I will say, *I thank 
you, O Athenians, but I will obey God, who, as I 
believe, set me this task, rather than you, and so long 
as I have breath and strength I will never cease 
from my occupation with philosophy. I know not 
what death is, — it may be a good thing and I am not 
afraid of it. But I do know that it is a bad thing to 
desert one's post and I prefer what may he good to 
what I know to he had/ " 

Socrates not only advocated the indefeasible right 
of the conscience of the individual, but absolute 
mental freedom and the importance of untram- 
meled discussion and criticism in the search for 
truth. "In me you have a stimulating critic, per- 
sistently urging you with persuasions and re- 
proaches, persistently testing your opinions and try- 
ing to show you that you are really ignorant of what 
you suppose you know. Daily discussion of the 
matter about which you hear me conversing is the 
highest good for man. Life that is not tested by 
such discussion is not worth living." 

Zeno, the controversialist of the Eleatic School of 
Philosophy, was the inventor of the process of dem- 
onstration called reductio ad absurdum, and the 
father of dialectics and sophistry ; he was born on the 
Island of Cyprus in 336 B. C, the same year in 
which Alexander became King of Macedon. Zeno 
was influenced in early youth by the reading of 
"Socratic books," and he journeyed to Athens to 
seek out and be taught by a man who best repre- 
sented the character of the old master. Zeno was 
referred to Crates of Thebes and from him absorbed 
the fundamentals of philosophy which he afterwards 



126 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

developed. He founded the School of Stoicism, 
which embodied the fundamental dogmas of what 
was known as Cynicism — that the individual alone 
is really existent, that virtue is the supreme good, 
and that the wise man, though a beggar, is truly a 
king. Zeno maintained that the ideal state must 
embrace the whole world and he built, not upon the 
changing tide of opinion, but upon the rock of 
knowledge and inmiutable truth. He beheved that 
the ideal would ultimately be reahzed by the exer- 
cise of individualistic, human reason and the practice 
of philosophy; he maintained that virtue, the su- 
preme good, is knowledge, and knowledge is within 
the reach of man. 

Alexander had proven for all time the absolute 
impossibihty of ever procuring unity and harmony 
of interests by physical external force, symbolized 
by conquest and the sword. When the ideal state 
of Zeno is established, no man shall say, "I am of 
Athens or of Sidon," but "I am a citizen of the 
world." The Stoic State was to be world-wide, a 
cosmopolis, and we are told that when Socrates or 
Diogenes was asked, "Of what city are you?" he 
replied, "Of the universe," and affirmed that he was 
a member, not of a class or city, but of a world-wide 
society in which all distinctions of race, caste and 
class were subordinated to the sense of kinship and 
brotherhood. Its laws, said Zeno, must be those 
which are prescribed by nature, not by convention; 
it will have no images or temples, for these are un- 
^ worthy of the nature of Deity ; no sacrifices, because 
God cannot be pleased, appeased or bribed by costly 
gifts; no law courts, for its citizens will be just and 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 127 

do one another no harm; no statues, for the virtue 
of its inhabitants will be its adornment. The world- 
state would not be held together either by force or 
by state-craft, but by good-will. Love, he affirmed, 
shall be master throughout the state, being, as it 
were, a God cooperating for the good of the whole. 
He believed that the coming of the perfect state 
was hindered by the narrow-mindedness of the peo- 
ple and the zealous egoism and dogmatization of be- 
liefs on the part of philosophers and those in au- 
thority. 

Zeno was eager to learn from all sources and 
strove to be perpetually receptive to truth. He 
journeyed to the abode of Stilpo, and we are told 
that Crates tried to drag him back by force to his 
own School, to which attitude Zeno retorted that 
argument would be more powerful. "The best 
handle of philosophers is that by the ear; persuade 
me if you can, and lead me that way ; if you use vio- 
lence, my body will stay with you, but my soul will 
be with Stilpo." Zeno taught with the Cynics that 
"Example is more potent than precept," and "Virtue 
is the only good," but he enthroned "reason" and 
affirmed that as the Logos or divine mind rules in 
the universe, so should it also in the individual. 
Those who live by a single and harmonious principle 
possess divine favor and an even flow of life; those 
who follow conflicting practices are ill-starred. In 
consistency of purpose, in harmony with law and the 
Cosmic Ideal, there is found virtue, and virtue is 
sufficient for happiness, not needing any external 
support. Life, therefore, should be lived "consist- 
ently with nature." 



128 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

The Academy had been founded in Athens, by 
Plato, in 380 B. C. Zeno founded his School about 
300 B. C, and his followers were first known as 
Zenonians, then as Stoics from the "Picture Porch," 
in which he delivered his lectures and which was dec- 
orated with paintings by Polygnotus. At the very 
time that Zeno was elaborating the doctrines of the 
Porch, another School of eminence was established 
by Epicurus (341-207 B. C), in his gardens at 
Athens. Epicurus maintained that pleasure is the 
end of life and with this belief he combined the 
atomistic philosophy of Democritus. His teaching 
was materialistic and absolutely opposed to that of 
Zeno ; naturally the Schools were in sharp and con- 
tinual conflict. About 270 B. C, Arcesilaus, an old 
school fellow of Zeno, became the head of the Aca- 
demic School, and promptly directed his teaching 
against that of Zeno and Epicurus. 

Considering the attitude of the Athenians in the 
days of Socrates, it is interesting to note that the 
conflict between the Academy, Porch and Garden 
Schools of Philosophy, which greatly surpassed all 
others in importance, did not embitter the political 
life of Athens. We are told that the citizens 
watched with amusement the competition of the 
Schools for numbers and influence and drew their 
profits from the crowd of foreigners who were 
drawn to Athens by its growing fame as a center of 
adult education. To the heads of the Schools they 
were ready to pay every mark of respect. To Zeno 
they gave the keys of the city and presented him 
with a gold crown and a bronze statue, although he, 
with Cleanthes, the religious poet-philosopher, de- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 129 

clined the citizenship of Athens lest they should be 
thought to hold cheap the places of their birth. 
Zeno died in the year 264 B. C. when 72 years of 
age, and the resolution which the Athenians passed 
in his honor, just prior to his death, deserves record 
because of its contrast with that by which their pred- 
ecessors had condemned the noble Socrates only 
one hundred and thirty-five years before : — 

"Whereas, Zeno, the son of Mnaseas from Citium, has spent 
many years in the city in the pursuit of philosophy; and has 
been throughout a good man in all respects; and has encour- 
aged the young men, who resorted to him, in virtue and tem- 
perance, and has sped them on the right path; and has made 
his own life an example to all men, for it has been consistent 
with the teachings he has set forth: Now, it seems good to 
the people of Athens to commend Zeno, the son of Mnaseas 
from Citium, and to crown him with a golden crown (in accord- 
ance with law) for his virtue and temperance, and to build him 
a tomb on the Ceramicus at the public expense. And the people 
shall elect five Athenian citizens to provide for the making of 
the crown and the building of the tomb. And the City Clerk 
shall engrave this vote on two pillars, and shall set one up in 
the Academy and one in the Lyceum. And the Treasurer shall 
make due allotment of the expense, that all men may see that 
the people of Athens honor good men both in their lifetime and 
after their death." 

All the technical charges brought against Socrates 
hold far more forcibly against Zeno, but the advan- 
tages of the philosophical schools to the city had 
become clearer, and it has been well said, "Who will 
may also read in the decree a belated mark of respect 
to the memory of Socrates." The same condition of 
mental and religious tolerance evidenced in Athens 
and elsewhere in the days of Zeno and conspicuous 
in the whole known world outside of Athens during 



130 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

and prior to the lifetime of Socrates, was later 
reflected in the Roman Empire. In 155 B. C, we 
find that the heads of three of the world's greatest 
philosophical schools, with many followers, were in 
Rome vigorously expounding their respective theo- 
ries before enormous, interested and tolerant audi- 
ences. Diogenes, of Salucia, represented the Stoics, 
Critolaus, the Peripatetic School founded by Aris- 
totle, and Carneades, the Academy. All forcefully 
lectured, extolling the reasonableness and logic of 
the principles which their Schools had accepted; and 
their profound depth of mental enquiry, with abun- 
dant, untrammeled thought and individualistic 
freedom of expression, made quite an impression on 
the leading minds of Rome which were inclined to 
be receptive, notwithstanding the professed alle- 
giance to mythical pagan gods. Philosophical dis- 
cussion and argument have always pointed the way 
to truth; superstition, dogmatized theology and 
acknowledgment of external authority have, from 
time immemorial, been deep shadows in the world, 
a veritable night of darkness and slumber for con- 
structive reason and the exercise of God-given men- 
tality with its upbuilding power. 

Cieanthes, of Assos (331-232 B. C), who suc- 
ceeded Zeno as head of the School of Stoicism, was 
a "Man of the people," trained in hardship and will- 
ing endurance; in personal character he was a 
worthy successor to Socrates, Diogenes and Zeno. 
We are told that "he drew water by night that he 
might study philosophy by day." Cieanthes often 
used verse "to express clearly his meaning and win 
access to men's ears." He affirmed that we should 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 131 

"look not at common opinion and be not eager to be 
wise of a sudden ; fear not the chatter of the many, 
in which there is no judgment and no modesty; for 
the crowd does not possess shrewd, just and fair 
judgment, but amongst the few you may, per- 
chance, find this." 

Chrysippus (280-206 B. C.) , who followed Clean- 
thes as head of the Porch School, expressed the same 
contempt for mass opinions and paid tribute to the 
individualistic reasoning power and freedom of 
thought ; in answer to the question as to why he had 
not studied with the popular Aristo, he said, "Had 
I followed the many, I should never 'have become a 
philosopher." The Stoic philosopher was well dis- 
ciphned, intellectually and morally, and the world 
has great need of such men today. Under all cir- 
cumstances he must speak the truth, the whole truth 
and nothing but the truth. Arnold says, "He could 
hold back nothing from his audience, even though 
his words might be offensive to their religious opin- 
ions, their patriotic feelings or their sense of 
decency; he could add no word which would touch 
their sympathies or kindle their indignation in the 
direction he himself might wish. He had always 
before his eyes the example of Socrates' defence 
before the Athenian jury." The Stoic appeared 
before his audience as a well-balanced, brave and 
honest speaker, void of all artifices, scorning emo- 
tionalism and the cheap tricks of suggestion — refus- 
ing to take advantage of the power of mob psy- 
chology. Gellius tells us that Diogenes, who had 
himself probably done the most to elaborate the 



132 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Stoic theory of style, was noted "as a quiet and self- 
restrained speaker." 

The Stoics maintained that philosophy conflicted 
with common opinion, but as Cleanthes said, it was 
not contrary to reason. Cicero tells us that they 
taught 

1. That only what is honorable is good, 

2. That virtue is sufficient for happiness, 

3. That right actions and offenses are equal, 

4. That all foolish men are mad, 

5. That the wise man alone is free and every 

foolish man a slave, 

6. That the wise man alone is rich. 

The Stoic philosophy, before it became contami- 
nated with theology and confined by dogmatism, 
was, in its essence, the rehgion of mental freedom. 
When the great Chinese teacher, Confucius, died 
in his 73rd year (479 B. C), his last words were 
regrets that none of the rulers then living possessed 
the sagacity requisite to a proper appreciation of 
true ethical philosophy. He died a natural, peace- 
ful death, unhonored but convinced that his pleas 
for mental freedom, truth, justice, industry, self- 
denial, moderation and public duty would yet stir 
humanity to its very depths. Emperor Tsin Shi- 
hwang made desperate efforts to destroy by fire the 
writings of Confucius, but they live today, exhort- 
ing men to be free and superior beings. Confucius 
has set forth, probably more lucidly than any other 
thinker, ancient or modern, the essentials of true 
morality, mental honesty, mental freedom, mental 
integrity — the only true philosophical attitude, for 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 133 

it never seeks to close the door of the mind to truth. 
"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, 
and when you do not know a thing, to acknowledge 
that you do not know it — this is knowledge." 

Confucius preached the freedom and domination 
of the human mind, he recognized the evils of unre- 
strained animal passion, ministered to instead of 
controlled by a human mind, which accordingly be- 
comes a slave instead of master. ''That whereby 
man differs from the lower animals is little. Most 
people throw it away, the superior man preserves 
it." Confucius was unhampered by customs, popu- 
lar opinions or traditions. "He had no foregone 
conclusions, no arbitrary predeterminations, no 
obstinacy and no egoism." He taught that there 
is no greater delight than to be conscious of sincerity 
upon honest and searching self-examination. Con- 
fucius resigned from a political office, under the 
Duke of Lu, because he would not be associated 
with any man whose mind was so enslaved to his 
body that he became guilty of immoral dissipation. 

Guatama, the Buddha, "the awakened," or "the 
enlightened one," was a young Indian Prince named 
Sakya Muni, who preached obedience to reason and 
universal benevolence. His teachings have been 
termed the Rehgion of Pessimism, but Buddhism 
was a revolt against national rivalries, ritualistic 
observances and polytheistic beliefs. Buddha 
preached his so-called heterodox doctrines without 
molestation and with no conspicuous restraint 
affecting his freedom of thought and expressions of 
his individualistic beliefs. Buddhism owed its suc- 
cess to its CathoHc spirit and its beautiful morality. 



134 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

It taught that the happiness of men depended not 
upon their birth but upon their actions and their 
thought. Buddhism ridiculed and combated the 
prevaihng Indian behef that the Brahmins were the 
aristocracy of heaven and it became the rehgion of 
justice, morahty and freedom for all. In the ser- 
mon of Benares, after the famous discussion of sor- 
row, Buddha said, "This is the holy truth of the 
Path to the Removing of Sorrow; it is the Holy 
Path of Eight Branches, which are called Right 
Belief, Right Aspiration, Right Word, Right Act, 
Right Life, Right Effort, Right Meditation and 
Right Subjection or Annihilation of Self." We 
also read in the Dhammapada, precepts that, if 
followed by professing worshippers of God, would 
put an absolute end to wars and the kindred evils of 
modern life. "Hatred does not cease by hatred at 
any time ; hatred ceases by love ; this is an old rule. 
Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome 
evil by good ; let him overcome the greedy by liber- 
ality and the liar by truth." 

The Gymnosophists, who taught philosophy to the 
people of India, were generally Buddhist Monks, 
of great courage, sympathy, gentleness, humility 
and high ethical standards. Plutarch tells us that 
Alexander the Great captured ten of these Indian 
philosophers who, it was claimed, had been instru- 
mental in causing S abbas to revolt. He decided 
to torment them, put different questions to all and 
"put to death the man who answered him the worst 
and so the rest in order." The first was asked 
whether he thought the living or the dead to be the 
most numerous. He answered, "The living, for the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 135 

dead are not" The second was asked, "Which 
breeds the largest animals, the sea or the land?" 
The answer was, "The land, for the sea is only part 
of it." The third was asked, "Which is the cleverest 
of animals?" He answered, "That which man has 
not yet discovered." The fourth was asked why he 
made Sabbas rebel. He replied, "Because I wish 
him to either live or to die with honor." The fifth 
was asked which he thought was first, the day or 
the night. He answered, "The day was first by one 
day." Alexander now asked the sixth how he could 
make himself most beloved. He answered, "By 
being powerful and yet not feared by his subjects." 
Of the remaining three, the first was asked how a 
man could become a god. He answered, "By doing 
that which it is impossible for a man to do." The 
next was asked which was the stronger, hf e or death. 
He answered, "Life, because it endures such terrible 
suffering." The last being asked how long it was 
honorable for a man to live answered, "As long as 
he thinks it better for him to live than to die." We 
are told that the free, untrammeled thought and 
quick responses of the humble but courageous Gym- 
nosophists amazed Alexander and he let them go 
unharmed. They valued as dross the external things 
in hfe which Alexander worshipped, and although 
poor as regards wealth, almost naked and declining 
not only the luxuries but even the conveniences of 
life, they were powerful and most influential leaders 
of the people solely because they used their endowed 
intellectual faculties. Thus, in pagan days, individ- 
ualistic reasoning saved the lives of men and mental 
originality was honored. Later, in the Christian 



136 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Era, an opinion contrary to that established by- 
authority meant persecution, suffering and death. 

Christ died a martyr to truth four hundred and 
thirty-two years after Socrates; He was murdered 
by religious fanatics after the Law had found "in 
Him, no fault at all." Christ was a carpenter by 
trade and was urged by prophetic call to leave His 
workshop and go forth into the world preaching 
the gospel which He had received. He was a man 
of the people who had received but little scholastic 
training, but His wisdom came from indwelhng 
knowledge that was of the spirit rather than devel- 
oped from the operation of the physical senses. 
After the death of this greatest prophet and sim- 
plest philosopher of all time, an era of Mental Re- 
pression was inaugurated; mankind gradually per- 
mitted their minds to be dogmatized and their souls 
fettered. 

History shows that knowledge grew in ancient 
days when speculation was perfectly free; and in 
modern times, since restrictions on enquiry have been 
removed, knowledge has advanced with relatively 
astounding velocity. From the sixteenth century 
to this day, nearly all important historical and 
epoch-making events bear some relation to the strug- 
gle of man for freedom of thought and rehef from 
early Christian and mediasval mental thralldom. 
As Bury has said, "A long time was needed to arrive 
at the conclusion that coercion of opinion is a mis- 
take and only a part of the world is yet convinced. 
That conclusion, so far as I can judge, is the most 
important ever reached by man." The Christian 
era has seen a continual struggle between arbitrary 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 137 

authority and reason. Authority has employed 
physical and moral violence, legal coercion, ostra- 
cism and social displeasure, whereas reason's only 
weapon has been argument. Reason cannot recog- 
nize arbitrary prohibition and barriers without being 
untrue to herself. She refuses to submit to dwarf- 
ing bondage and mental serfdom, but boldly asserts 
her absolute rights throughout the whole domain of 
thought and the universe of experience. 

The greatest and most valuable achievement of 
modern civilization is the estabhshment of liberty 
for thought and discussion, and although this priv- 
ilege may be and is at times abused by unanchored 
minds and fanatical enthusiasts, nevertheless, as a 
condition making for social progress and the devel- 
opment of humanity, it is essential and should be 
deemed fundamental. It is well to note, however, 
that many men have fanatically and bhndly fought 
for what they were pleased to term freedom of 
thought, whereas they could peaceably have at- 
tained and enjoyed real mental freedom, had they 
willed it so and not been so stubbornly engrossed in 
the pursuit of what, in reality, was a mere chimera — 
a hallucination of an uneducated and prejudiced 
mind. 

During the Christian era, it seems as if every 
freedom gained by man has been obtained with a 
reaction of some form of slavery ; and history is full 
of acts of enslaving intolerance on the part of those 
who have successfully fought for tolerance. Mental 
slavery exists today, more blighting in many of its 
phases than the curse of physical slavery. At every 
period during the so-called Age of Culture, the 



138 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

people who have really cared about reason and indi- 
viduality of thought have been a woefully small 
minority. Spencer said, "It really seems as if the 
aim of the great majority was to get through life 
with the least possible outlay of thought." 

If we do not use our endowed faculties and de- 
velop our mental powers, exercise our brains and 
practice reason, we become puppets on Hfe's stage, 
the sport of circumstance, of suggestion and errone- 
ous beliefs. We accept the opinions of others with- 
out weighing or dissecting them; we believe that 
which is told us without making any attempt at veri- 
fication and without using our innate faculties to 
peer into its reasonableness ; such mental inertia and 
somnolence of mind mar our development and 
give it a direction which does violence to our fun- 
damental tendencies. 

There is a great difference between real freedom 
of thought and arbitrary compulsion tending to 
compel every one else to beheve another's beliefs. It 
is also desirable to draw the hne of distinction 
between freedom of thought and freedom of action ; 
the former affects oneself, the latter may affect the 
freedom and happiness of others and must, at times, 
be regulated for the good of society. The free man 
is the true individual who uses his cerebral gray 
matter under the direction of his personal and domi- 
nating will ; who thinks and reasons for himself and 
who forms individual opinions on all matters per- 
taining to life. "The revelation of thought takes 
men out of servitude into freedom." Freedom is to 
be found in persistent seeking for truth and in the 
expression of it, in harmony with nature and Cosmic 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 139 

Law. Payot has well said that it is in this that free- 
dom consists — in the infusion of one's personal atti- 
tude into the realities of life. "To be free means, 
therefore, that one realizes the laws which register 
the exterior and interior realities of life, and that one 
realizes oneself. If these two conditions are not ful- 
filled, the complete and harmonious development of 
personality is impossible." 



VII 

ALEXANDER III (356-323 B. C), sur- 
named the Great, is usually pictured as a 
man of superhuman force, indomitable wiU 
and unprecedented ability; but he was really an 
unstable man of great but unharnessed and uncon- 
trolled power. He was cursed with a vanity which 
amounted to madness and his egotistical assumption 
of the honors of a god could not fail but prove 
odious to the simple and natural Macedonians. He 
could not endure any form of criticism or even tol- 
erate candidness, and under the influence of wine or 
contradiction, was subject to fits of ungovernable 
rage. His character reminds one of Stevenson's 
"Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde;" — a man of extremes 
and irreconcilable contrasts — sublime in strength, 
pitiful in weakness ; his virtues and vices were great ; 
his magnanimity and his cruelty were both without 
bounds. 

Alexander had a powerful but unregulated men- 
tality that was continually flying off tangent into 
space ; his will was not strong enough to control and 
discipline his mind and by so doing, create a person- 
ality stable, poised, positive and virtuous. If Alex- 
ander, with his unequalled opportunities, had devel- 
oped a strong will to control his life and actions, he 
might have lived an average span of fruitful years 
and completely changed the features of the world 

141 



142 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

and the course of history; Italy would not have 
become united under the power of Rome, Carthage 
would have been Greek, the Roman Empire would 
never have been born and Latin would probably 
have remained a "mere rustic dialect," finally pass- 
ing away with the establishment of Greek as the 
reigning language. 

Alexander's success, which consisted of the con- 
quest of Persia, was made possible by his father, 
Philip II, a pre-eminently practical genius, who, 
by bribery and intrigue combined with some force, 
had made himself President of the Greek Confed- 
eration, prepared and disciplined to perfection a 
tremendous army of natural fighters and skillfully 
worked out a plan of campaign "to avenge the 
ancient wrongs of Greece." Alexander inherited 
his father's throne, army, purpose and program for 
the subjugation of Persia, but history tells us that 
the young man, consumed with a most unnatural, 
unfilial ambition, fretted during his murdered 
father's last years, fearful that Philip would have 
the glory of working out the well-laid plans and 
that he, Alexander, would be left no opportunity 
for great achievement and the impress of his own 
name upon the world. Moreover, because Alex- 
ander was somewhat estranged from his father and 
his succession to the throne imperiled, due to his 
father's second marriage and the ascendency of 
Cleopatra's kinsmen, suspicion for the responsibility 
of the foul deed at Aegae naturally fell upon Alex- 
ander himself. Alexander was not the only claim- 
ant to the vacant throne and before the crown was 
attained, he traveled through much blood, putting 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 143 

to death an innocent, helpless infant brother and 
cousin. 

Alexander made one historic journey of conquest 
and his great cause for alarm, during his Persian 
campaign, was the fact that he could not control his 
own countrymen and soldiers. The nearer men 
lived to him and the closer they came in contact with 
his own unstable, erratic personality and saw at 
close hand the workings of his dissolute passions 
and nauseating egoism, the more dissatisfied and 
mentally discontented they became. Grote has said, 
"He had none of that sense of correlative right and 
obligation which characterized the free Greek." 

Alexander was very sensitive about the fact that 
he had only reaped the harvest planned by other 
minds and had not passed the frontiers fixed by the 
Persians and their great Kings, Cyrus the Great 
and Darius; — he attempted once, and dismally 
failed. The commonly repeated story that he con- 
quered one world and wept because there were no 
more worlds to conquer, is warped and untrue. 
Arabia Felix, at the mouth of the Red Sea; Ethi- 
opia, the reputed land of gold ; Carthage, the great 
Republic of the West; Spain, the land of silver; 
Sicily, which Athens could not conquer ; Rome and 
the Italian cities, which Alexander's uncle had 
endeavored in vain to subjugate, not to mention 
Northern Europe, China, India, the Steppes of 
Tartary and the deserts of Africa, were all still out- 
side the domain of Alexander's Empire; many of 
them were defiant and unawed by the man who had 
sworn to blot out the word "barbarian" from the 
vocabulary of the Greeks, but whose prime instru- 



144 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

merit for achievement was a fighting force of virile 
Macedonian barbarians "with the strength and 
sinews of wild and courageous mountaineers." 

In his youth, Alexander being nimble and light- 
footed, his father Philip encouraged him to run in 
the Oljonpic Race. His scornful reply was, "I 
would if there were kings to race with me." In the 
campaign against Darius, he replied to Darius' 
offer of arbitration in the interest of peace, by say- 
ing, "The earth could not bear two suns, neither can 
it tolerate two kings." Alexander was not a patriot 
but an egoist. He was too ignorantly selfish and 
vainglorious to be truly great. He expressed, at 
times, admirable qualities and a magnificent spirit, 
but he fought for Alexander, not for Greece. One 
historian has well said that his ambition was to make 
Greece Persian and not Persia Greek; hence his 
magnanimity to the conquered Persians, an attitude 
necessary for their personal allegiance to himself, 
for the maintenance of the Empire and the further 
reahzation of his ambitions. The natural subservi- 
ence of the Persians appealed to the arrogant Alex- 
ander, as it always does to a weak and shallow man. 
He ordered that the ceremony of prostration should 
be performed by all in his presence and proclaimed 
himself the Son of Jove, giving the Oracle of Jupi- 
ter Ammon of the Sahara as his authority for this 
staggering pretext. 

When Alexander's uncle invaded Italy and was 
beaten back, we are told that he sarcastically de- 
clared that "Alexander had fallen upon the cham- 
bers of the women but he on the chambers of the 
men." The statement, idly quoted by Alexander's 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 145 

bosom friend and companion, Clitus, during a 
drunken revel at Samarcand, resulted in a violent 
upheaval of uncontrollable passion and the murder 
by Alexander of his most trusted friend and one to 
whom he had previously owed his life. Alexander 
murdered not only his closest associate in passion, 
accentuated by inebriation, but he destroyed him- 
self — his uncontrolled mind and unlicensed appetite 
running riot with a weak and vacillating will, thus 
undermining his constitution and causing his un- 
timely death. 

The self-proclaimed god was not sufficiently im- 
mortal to withstand the intoxication and constitu- 
tional ravages of alcohol. He was embalmed, placed 
in a golden casket, and buried with pomp in his own 
city of Alexandria, but is it not a travesty on human 
greatness and Alexander's assumption of God-like 
worth, that a Ptolemy ( descendant of one of his own 
Generals) later removed the body from its golden 
coffin, used the precious metal for his own degen- 
erate ends and re-entombed the royal body in a sim- 
ple casket? As Marcus Aurelius truly said, "Death 
put Alexander of Macedon and his stable boy on a 
par." 

The story of Alexander, this outwardly great but 
inwardly lamentably unstable man, is the greatest 
lesson in history of the workings of a weak will, 
unable to control and regulate for good, nature's 
mental endowment of great dominant human 
forces; tremendous power pregnant with possibili- 
ties for world's service. Here is high pressure steam, 
intense draft, raging inner fires, but without a 
steady hand on the throttle operating with cool and 



146 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

definite purpose. Safety valves persistently pop 
with passion ; the springs through constant use lose 
their resilience ; the inner pressure becomes greater 
than the body or boiler shell can house or withstand, 
and then comes the catastrophe, — that death and 
sudden himian extinction caused by the very forces 
which were designed to be creative and intended to 
be utilized in driving the world nearer to the goal of 
Cosmic perfection. 

Napoleon has been called the Alexander of mod- 
ern times, but Napoleon had a far stronger will than 
Alexander, although he relentlessly struggled to 
achieve his goal through blood and in arrogant defi- 
ance of all virtues. Napoleon's ideal was a strong 
delusion founded on error and contemptuous self- 
ishness, and the falseness of his heart impregnated 
all his dealings with others. "False as a bulletin" 
became a proverb in Napoleon's time, and whatever 
goodness and truth there was in the "Petit Cap- 
oral" had been supplanted by error and vicious, 
supercilious charlatanry by the time he gained Em- 
perorship. He bridled the power that had been 
expressed in that horrible but great French Revolu- 
tion and used it for his own aggrandizement. He 
was determined to found "his dynasty." Self and 
false ambition were his gods. He degenerated to 
self-deception and, as Carlyle says, wrapt his per- 
verted self in "a paltry patchwork of theatrical 
paper mantles, tinsel and mummery, thinking to 
make it more real thereby." With his soul steeped 
in blood and blackened with error, he demanded of 
democracy a ceremonial coronation and as Augereau 
said, there was "wanting nothing to complete the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 147 

pomp of it — nothing but the half milhon of men 
who had died to put an end to all that." 

Napoleon believed that with his indomitable will 
draped in worldly grandeur, a commanding embodi- 
ment of authority and power, he could dupe all men, 
crucify truth, and live glorified and unrivaled on the 
clouds of falseness. But such a career is by the very 
nature of things doomed to be brief and transitory, 
"a flash as of gun powder wide-spread; a blazing 
up of dry heath. For an hour, the whole Universe 
seems wrapped in smoke and flame ; but only for an 
hour. It goes out, the Universe with its old moun- 
tains and streams, the stars above, and kind soil 
beneath is still there." As Alexander fought for 
Alexander and not for Greece or Macedonia, so 
Napoleon thought not of France but of Napoleon. 
France was great, "but was not he France?" 

The career of Alexander typifies the horrors of 
duality and instabihty of personality due to a vacil- 
lating, weak and undirected will; that of Napoleon 
symbolizes the sufferings and evils which follow in 
the wake of a powerful mind, wrongly and persist- 
ently directed in the course of error, by an ambi- 
tious, selfish, unscrupulous and dominant will. "Be 
of courage," said the Duke of Weimar to his friends 
and followers, "this Napoleonism cannot last, for it 
is founded on injustice and falsehood." Carlyle 
truly said that injustice pays itself with frightful 
compound interest ; the heavier such diabolical pow- 
ers as Napoleonism and militarism bear tyran- 
nously down upon this world, stifling that which is 
noble and God-like in man and haughtily trampling 
a heart-racked, bleeding and suffering humanity 



148 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

under foot, the fiercer will always be the world's 
recoil and the reaction against oppression and soul- 
dwarfing error. 

Napoleon experienced St. Helena instead of the 
realization of his dream of Emperor of the World. 
His legacy to Europe was militarism, the greatest 
curse that a viperous vindictiveness could have con- 
ceived. Until militarism is banished to oblivion, as 
was Napoleon, Europe and the whole world will 
continue to be cursed by the deviHsh fermentation of 
avarice and falseness which emanated from one 
human mind, forced into and maintained in the path- 
way of depravity and calamitous error by a power- 
ful and diabolical will. 

We speak today of the Napoleons of Finance and 
Industry, ignorantly using the term in praise rather 
than censure. Men who achieve conspicuous success 
due to indomitable will power, concentration, main- 
tained purpose and hard work, are great in so far as 
their purpose is great or their work of lasting good. 
If the world is a gainer by their work and if human- 
ity will ultimately benefit by their efforts, then it is 
an insult to brand such men "Napoleons." If, how- 
ever, their true ambition in life is selfish; if they 
have builded on hes and falseness; if they strive to 
dupe, oppress, cheat and tyrannize within and with- 
out the law ; if might to them makes right ; if Mam- 
mon is their God (whether they worship money for 
the power it gives or for the gratification of appe- 
tite) ; if their will is driving them relentlessly along 
the road of error, then they may be fittingly stigma- 
tized as "Napoleons," and the world would be better 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 149 

off if St. Helenas of banishment and isolation could 
be found to receive them. 

There are many more Alexanders than Napo- 
leons in the world, for few wills are sufficiently- 
depraved to persist in driving a human mind ruth- 
lessly forward against a man's higher nature. Irres- 
olute wills and fluctuating minds are met with in 
every walk of hf e ; and passion, temper and explo- 
siveness are common in the peasant and unskilled 
laborer, as well as in rulers and world leaders. The 
more mental a man's occupation, the stronger his 
intellect should become and the more purposeful and 
strengthened his will. The more unnatural a man's 
mode of living — and undue exercise of brain at the 
expense of bodily muscles and organs is unnatural, 
even if required by the artificial conditions sur- 
rounding the modern life — the more nervous his 
temperament, the greater becomes the tendency to 
instability, high tension and the snapping of unduly 
keyed-up strings. An exhibition of temper is a 
temporary relapse from a human personality gov- 
erned by will to the condition of a brute of a lower 
order, a sort of atavism or reversion to an ancient, 
ancestral characteristic ; it is also insanity, mind un- 
soundness, a defiance of mental, rational and uni- 
versal law. Fortunately for humanity, the mental 
life not only keys up the nerves to high tension, but 
it tends to develop the will to control the nerves. 

A truly great man is one with a strong will, 
rightly directed, that controls his mind, regulating 
the steam pressure and throttle valve so that the 
safety valves never pop ; and thus the energy is con- 
served and the inner power is used in the perform- 



150 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

ance of useful work. Temper is weakness, passion 
is brutish, explosiveness of personality is stupid, 
irrational and inefficient. Much that is excused un- 
der the designation of "righteous indignation" is 
corroding and injurious. Any habit or tendency 
that detrimentally affects the constitution and the 
inner life is founded on error; true indignation is 
expressed by calmness, determination and work to 
overcome a cause, and not by the useless and often 
dramatic blowing off of steam into the surrounding 
atmosphere. Passion is error, depreciating and en- 
feebling, whether it be falsely glorified by expres- 
sion in the interest of virtue, or condemned as an 
attribute of inherent vice. The suppression of the 
outward explosive expression of inner intensity of 
feeling is the first step toward elimination of the 
useless expenditure of power ; the next step is to be 
inwardly poised and with sanity see things in their 
proper perspective, refusing to be consumed by 
wrath that can only weaken and lessen one's effec- 
tiveness. The first real step toward reform comes 
when one learns to expend all his energy and force 
outward, to control as well as eradicate, working 
with sympathy and effective purpose to overcome 
error in actual combat, rather than to expend one's 
energy in fruitless turmoil with the weakening of 
one's forces, either dramatically on life's open stage 
or behind the scenes in the sanctity of the human 
mind. A strong, efficient and purposeful will de- 
rides passion and explosions of every kind. 

The wiU directing the human mind toward the 
goal of Cosmic Truth needs all its power for prog- 
ress and it, therefore, screws down the springs of the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 151 

safety valve and scientifically manages as well as 
directs and utilizes its forces. Alexanders of pas- 
sion, duality and vacillation are hard to get along 
with in the fields and workshops of life, but Alexan- 
ders in executive chairs are the curse of modern 
industrial and commercial life. An Alexander ever 
seeks to inflict his own whimsical mind upon his col- 
leagues and subordinates. There is only one way to 
do a thing and that is his way, notwithstanding the 
fact that Alexander's way on Tuesday is not the 
Alexandrian way dictated on Monday. Alexanders 
love the limelight, but it must be exclusively focused 
and kept shining on themselves. Like Nero of 
Rome, they tighten and slacken the strings of gov- 
ernment to suit their humor of the moment; and 
their bestowal of praise or censure, approbation or 
disapproval, a smile or a frown, depends not upon 
one's conformity to truth and rightness, but upon 
the Alexandrian capricious egoism, its selfish, re- 
stricted and warped view of a situation or the untu- 
tored propensities of the moment. 

Truth, goodness and rightness are definite, posi- 
tive, eternal and yet tractable, and, to a great extent, 
reachable, but the will of an Alexander is so fickle, 
whimsical and capricious that what is heralded as 
the goal today, is rejected tomorrow. An Alexan- 
drian mind demands the subservience of all his fol- 
lowers and subordinates, for is he not infallible — the 
Son of Jove ? Such a man in executive power insists 
upon the subjection and serfdom of every will that 
comes under his domination ; and in this way, great 
mental forces designed to contribute to the world's 



152 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

progress are enslaved and enchained in deplorable 
and humiliating bondage. 

A truly great leader encourages the growth and 
strives to develop all the latent as well as the appar- 
ent forces of his colleagues, assistants and working 
staff, down the line to the humblest toiler. His will 
is firm and strong in direction as well as power ; the 
goal is in harmony with Cosmic Truth; egoism is 
subordinated to an idealism of achievement which 
demands the highest ultimate good. He is not fanat- 
ical, but sane and balanced — not a faddist, but a 
sound, rational, but expanding conservative; his 
decisions are based on justice, not on hysterical emo- 
tion, passion, or caprice ; his honor is not built upon 
the shifting sands of policy, but upon the rock of 
eternal, immutable truth. His attitude is never 
hypercritical, captious or sophistical, but he seeks to 
express himself by logic and explainable calm 
reason, tempered with tolerance and human sym- 
pathy. Such a leader is never perfect but is per- 
fecting; he knows his own limitations and is satis- 
fied if he is pointing right and is using all his capa- 
bilities and inherent power to drive or lift himself, 
his followers and co-workers upward into larger 
truth and world usefulness. 

Napoleon fought for democracy and demanded a 
crown for his reward. Cromwell fought for free- 
dom from oppression, for deliverance from the idol- 
atry of externals and the worship of hollow shams, 
for Puritanism and democracy with free represen- 
tation of the people. Being "commander-in-chief 
of all the forces raised and to be raised," he later 
used his army of Ironsides to make himself virtually 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 153 

King of England, opposed free suffrage and numer- 
ical majority and dismissed the parliaments of the 
people. Cromwell fought, deposed and murdered 
a wretched, weak, depraved King for democracy's 
sake, only in victory to reign as a despotic autocrat 
and absolute dictator, with drawn sword as well as 
open Bible. Thus do strong men at times build 
towers of arrogance on foundations of error, while 
blinding their followers with pictures of truth and 
lulling their own brains to lethargy and somnolence 
with fine sounding words. 

The human will, vacillating and chameleon-hued, 
is in continual combat between truth and error, 
virtue and vice, life and death. The strong will 
directed in the channel of error is opposed to all that 
is noble, uplifting and eternal in life. The well 
directed human will that, compass-like, points to the 
heavenly star and strives, encourages and grows to 
attain, is an attribute of the divine in man. The 
human soul with such a will, be its material mind 
great and complex, or small and relatively simple, 
is worthy to be called "A Son of Jove," if such an 
eminently inspiring and glorious designation may 
be given to mortal man. 



VIII 

THE world of opportunity is free to all. Past 
every man surges the stream of life, giving 
him at some time or other an opportunity to 
utilize at least a part of his endowed mental equip- 
ment, and in its exercise and expenditure he con- 
tributes little or much to the worth-while work of 
humanity. Every man in some way, at some time, 
can use to advantage all of his inherent faculties; 
the Goddess Fate, however, does not advertise ap- 
proach of opportunities but seems rather to find 
diaboHcal enjoyment in weaving the net of des- 
tiny around the anchored feet of blinded men. To 
a very few, opportunity is ushered in with a blare 
of trumpets, but the vast majority of men have to 
hunt out and learn to quickly discern their chance, 
embrace it and cHng to it as it rushes by, phantom- 
like or enveloped in haze. Sometimes, as in the 
chamber of our minds we attend to our daily duties, 
a gray-haired man named Opportunity, resembling 
Father Time and as old as Mars, bangs at the door 
and vociferously announces the passing of the 
vehicle which he drives toward the goal of worth- 
while achievement; but more often he flits by, 
shadow-like, a mere spectre, and without any an- 
nouncement of his passage, is gone. "Opportunity 
comes," said the old proverb, "with feet of wool, 
treading soft." One must have the instinct of an 

165 



156 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

artist to feel and understand the approach of this 
good genius. 

Opportunities are not labeled and never present 
themselves stamped with their relative values. The 
same opportunity to obtain and achieve is never ex- 
actly duplicated. Each chance rejected, either 
volitionally or through indifference, never returns 
— it has gone for all time. The opportunities pre- 
sented in youth do not recur in mature life or old 
age; possibihties for achievement do not revolve in 
cycles, for time in the aggregate works very dif- 
ferently from the clock, the moon's phases, the 
earth's rotation and its yearly orbit journey, the 
harvest and the tides. 

Achievements of youth form a foundation upon 
which to build the glories of age. The Japanese 
have always appreciated the fact that honor early 
won grows with advancing years and that "an op- 
portunity presented and unimproved in youth, re- 
turns not in age." In the memorable siege of 
Osaka, a young son of lyeyasu, in spite of his earn- 
est entreaties to be put in the vanguard of the at- 
tacking force, was placed, because of his youth, in 
the rear of the army. When the castle fell, he was 
so chagrined and wept so bitterly that an old coun- 
selor tried to console him with all the resources at 
his command. "Take comfort, Sire," he said, "at 
the thought of the long future before you. In the 
many years that you may live there will come divers 
occasions to distinguish yourself." The boy fixed 
his indignant gaze upon the man and said, "How 
foolishly you talk! Can ever my fourteenth year 
come 'round again?" 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 157 

To embrace every opportunity and take full ad- 
vantage of circumstances as they unfold themselves, 
the mind's vision must be perpetually centered on 
the chambers where "insight" dwells. We should 
live life with all our creative power in the present, 
but with our psychical vision ever peering as a 
searchlight into the haze ahead. Eternal watchful- 
ness, coupled with the insight which understands 
and the energy eager to perform, is the essential 
of true and lasting success. The average man must 
carve out his own future and this can only be done 
by preparation, diligence and the prompt embrac- 
ing of opportunities. Rochefoucauld said that we 
ought not so much to apply ourselves to create op- 
portunities as to make use of those which present 
themselves. An individual cannot create oppor- 
tunities, but he can struggle to find them and in 
clutching threads, invisible to others, and grasping 
leads to usefulness out of the surrounding ether, 
that others do not see or value rightly, he will prove 
to be a wise and successful man. 

Opportunities of some type or other are ever 
around us ; they whisper or thunder in every man's 
ear and pass in some way and at some time every 
man's door. The alert and energetic respond and 
become successful ; the deaf and irresolute remain in- 
active and gravitate from passiveness to failure. 
Saint Beuve said of Joseph Joubert, the French 
moralist (1754-1824), who though wonderfully 
talented has left little to posterity, that he lived in 
the region between "The time has not come yet," and 
"The time has passed." Opportunities came and 
passed by unimproved, as the spirit to do and the 



158 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

time to do, warred with each other. Coleridge was 
a man of genius and gigantic intellectual capacity, 
but Charles Lamb, mourning his death, wrote to a 
friend and said that Coleridge "left about forty- 
thousand treatises on Metaphysics and Divinity and 
not one of them complete." 

No man should grieve over lost opportunities to 
such a degree that his usefulness is lessened in the 
present; no man should minimize present oppor- 
tunities looking for still greater ones in the future. 
The past may be a good teacher, but to live either 
in the past or in the future is dangerous. Small or 
apparently insignificant opportunities for service, 
accepted in the present, prepare one to successfully 
improve greater opportunities in the future. Many 
men believe that an opportunity comes only as a 
revelation, such as the angel appearing to Paul and 
the voices heard by Joan of Arc. The imagination 
may produce such revelations, but opportunities of 
moment to our souls lie in the life path of every 
man — of the king and the humble peasant, the 
scholar and the so-called uneducated, the rich and 
the poor. 

There is an old Italian proverb, "If all cannot 
live on the piazza, every one may feel the sun." 
There are degrees of happiness, also degrees of 
service and attainment, but it is possible for all to 
realize absolute efficiency commensurate with one's 
innate forces, no matter what their relative value to 
the world may be. There is metal in every man, 
which, as Ulysses said, should not rest unburnished 
but rather shine in use ; — the shining of the metals 
of talents comes from the embracing of oppor- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 159 

tunities demanding usage and the burnishing of in- 
nate powers in world service. 

Homer ridiculed the idea of inactivity, maintain- 
ing that life consists in doings not in mere breath- 
ing. Life is motion. We are constantly passing 
from the past into the future ; and to each of us, as 
we pass through the door of the present, is given 
an opportunity in some degree or other, and an in- 
spiring challenge "to make our lives count for 
something in the scheme of things; and each is 
given his share of time which is his chance." The 
past is forever gone, its opportunities will never re- 
turn, but the past never dies ; it is the living womb 
of the future. Indifference and somnolence in the 
past tend to germinate indolence and indifference 
in the present, for negative habits quickly grow and 
enslave. Eternal wakefulness, heedful vigilance 
and joyful, timely enterprise are essential to suc- 
cess and praiseworthy achievement. Taylor said 
that "the retrospect of hfe swarms with lost op- 
portunities," but it is equally true that contempla- 
tion of the present and the future offers wonderful 
opportunities to the one who can see and has the 
determination to do. 

Jules Payot said that there are some people who 
allow opportunities for usefulness and real pleas- 
ure to slip through their fingers because it is too 
much trouble to close their hands. Such people in- 
flict upon themselves the emptiest lives imaginable. 
St. Jerome facetiously compares them to wooden 
soldiers who always have their swords raised with- 
out ever striking a blow. It is a law of life that 
the expenditure of effort in some form or other is 



160 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

necessary if results are to be achieved. Work is 
synonymous with true development and lasting suc- 
cess. When Polycrates asked of the Delphic Ora- 
cle the best means of finding the treasures buried 
by Xerxes' General, Mardonius, on the field of 
Platoea, the response was "Turn every stone." 
When Newton was asked how he had learned to 
see so clearly into the problems of physical science, 
he rephed, "By persistent thought and work." A 
more modern scientist, asked if he believed that his 
inventions were largely the result of inspiration, re- 
plied that they must be, if concentration and per- 
spiration could be considered as inspiration. "Dili- 
gence," said Cervantes, "is the mother of good for- 
tune." 

It does not take much ability to commence a line 
of work, or much foresight to embrace some oppor- 
tunities; but it often does take intelligent energy, 
persistency and manhood to creditably finish the 
work. "No real man," said Plutarch, "ever wetted 
clay, then left it as if there would be bricks by 
chance and fortune." Generally it is good to com- 
mit the beginning of all worthy actions to Argus 
with a hundred eyes; and the ends of them to 
Briareus with a hundred hands; the first to watch 
and search for opportunities for service, the latter 
to speed forward the work with energy and dili- 
gence. We cannot estimate a man's usefulness by 
the number of things he commences or the number 
of opportunities he embraces, but by the things that 
he performs to completeness. It is said that the 
telephone was made commercially practical by 
Bell's giving a screw the last quarter turn. The 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 161 

world has crying need of finishers, — of men who 
can give the last finishing twist to whatever they 
undertake. It is also comparatively easy to do 
what we feel compelled to do, and go when we feel 
driven, but the real test of a man is not so much 
the discharge of obligatory as of voluntary self- 
appointed tasks. Goss has said that "a man is not 
half a man who does not do some things with his 
teeth clenched and his face set." Achievement 
worth while comes from the overcoming of resis- 
tance. A life of power and service cannot be spent 
like a summer holiday ; it requires the taking up of 
tasks, the strength of will to overcome, the soul 
struggle to conquer. There is an old true saying 
that "Men are like salmon, the Hve ones travel up- 
stream, while the dead ones all float down." 

Man, when successful, is prone to burn incense 
to his own greatness and blame destiny and the gods 
when his misdirected efforts or indifference to op- 
portunity result in failure. One of the most evi- 
dent qualities inherited from our progenitors is the 
desire, almost amounting to mania, to endeavor to 
unload the responsibility for troubles and errors 
upon some person, circumstance, influence, or con- 
dition outside of ourselves. "Adam blamed Eve 
for his trouble. Eve blamed the serpent." Homer 
tells us how vainly mortal men do blame the gods 
when their own perverseness is the cause of their 
shortcomings and non-success. "For of us, men 
say, come evil," said the gods, "whereas they even 
of themselves through the blindness of their own 
hearts have sorrows beyond that which is ordained." 
The cause of failure in life lies not in the stars but 



162 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

in ourselves; and Emerson has said that at every 
moment of a man's life, it is himself and nobody- 
else who fixes his position. 

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, 
Which we ascribe to heaven; the fatal sky 
Gives us free scope, and only backward pulls 
Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull." 

Alexander the Great believed in a favoring fate 
and died a premature death, due to the violation of 
nature's laws. Cicero beheved in luck and was 
slain near Formiae, a victim of Mark Antony's re- 
venge. Cgesar told the frightened pilot in a storm, 
"Have no fear for you carry Caesar and his good 
fortune;" yet Csesar's star could not protect him 
from the blades of his assassins. Napoleon was al- 
ways talking about destiny but he never dreamed 
that he would die a discredited, broken-hearted 
man, in exile. His conqueror, WelHngton, on the 
other hand, never believed in luck and he never lost 
a battle. He exercised intelligent industry in pre- 
paring to meet any possible surprise, and arranging 
to cope with any emergency; at Waterloo, at the 
height of the battle he did not talk of stars or for- 
tune but said, "This is hard pounding, gentlemen — 
but let us show them who pounds the hardest and 
will pound the longest." Madison C. Peters, re- 
ferring to the influences which seem to form the 
destiny of man, said, "Bad luck is a man with his 
hands in his pockets, Micawber-like, waiting to see 
how things will turn out. Good luck is a man with 
his sleeves rolled up, hard at work, making things 

go- 

Those who plead that they have had no chance in 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 163 

life are usually those who feel that they have not 
enjoyed any advantage over the remainder of the 
field. Chance and advantage are two entirely dif- 
ferent propositions; and chances for true success, 
mental growth, culture and manly development do 
not necessarily presuppose the proverbial "silver 
spoon." It has been well said that the walls of the 
temple of immortals are bright with the names of 
those who, in the eyes of the world, as regards birth 
and fate, "had no chance." The men of history 
who have achieved the greatest and most vital evo- 
lutionary and revolutionary victories in the struggle 
for progress, were poor men who had to work, fight 
and force the world to hear them and their message. 
The odds against them only increased their aggres- 
siveness and persistency and sharpened their mental 
forces; the exercise of their faculties against the 
deadening resistance of the world made of them 
heroes with Spartan courage, although they often 
became martyrs to prejudice in order to perform 
their world-appointed tasks and gain their immor- 
tality. 

If it were not for the thinkers and courageous 
workers of the past, for the individuals of the world 
who have used their gray matter in the spirit of 
freedom and stood bravely alone, unfettered by tra- 
dition, we should today be where man stood in pre- 
historic times, "wearing short pelisse made of sheep 
skins and beating each other to death with stone 
hanmiers." We may not have advanced as far from 
this stage of barbarity as the civilized world in the 
spring of 1914 believed, nevertheless, as far as we 
have advanced beyond savagery and brutishness, 



164 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

such progress is entirely due to the development 
and utilization of our psychological forces and the 
resultant acceptance of some part of Cosmic Truth. 

The faults and shortcomings of our present, 
much-vaunted civilization are solely the results of 
error, the lack of true freedom, the worship of ex- 
ternals and the crucifixion of the inner man. The 
bigotry of tradition and the falseness of dwarfing 
and lethargic mind-habits have caused men to de- 
generate into geese in thought, parrots in talk and 
sheep in action. War and violence in every form 
are the fruits of ignorance, the sterilizer of the 
germs of progress, the banisher of the soul from 
the world and the destroyer of all that is noble, cul- 
tivated and immortal in man. 

Every man has ample opportunities for the de- 
velopment and use of innate faculties — if he so wills 
it. The path to immortal success and true himian 
greatness is blazed by the Hves and work of men 
who "had no chance" in the eyes of an indolent and 
thoughtless public. 

Shakespeare (1564-1616), the greatest of poets, 
was a poor boy and held horses for gentlemen in 
London. Albrecht Diirer (1471-1528), the great 
German painter and engraver, was one of eighteen 
children and his parents were in very straightened 
circumstances. Andrea del Sarto (1487-1531), one 
of the greatest of Italian painters, was the son of a 
poor tailor and was put to work and made to shift 
for himself at the early age of seven. 

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the famous Scotch- 
German philosopher, was the son of a saddler and 
throughout his childhood and youth suffered from 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 165 

poverty. Furthermore, he was physically feeble, 
concave-chested and emaciated; he suffered con- 
stantly from a deformed right shoulder, and later 
even became blind; nevertheless, at thirty-one we 
find him a student in the university, and later living 
a life of strict regimen, with mechanical regularity. 
In spite of the handicaps of poverty and ill health, 
he developed himself into a powerful mental force 
that made itself felt throughout the world. Kant 
never traveled more than forty miles from Konigs- 
berg, the place of his birth, but his work has in- 
fluenced thought in every land of the globe. He 
banded all his weak physical forces and utilized his 
bodily energy with maximum efficiency under the 
domination of his great intellect and powerful will. 
William Murdock (1754-1839), the British in- 
ventor and engineer, was the son of a millwright in 
poor circumstances; he "had no chance" yet he was 
the first to make coal gas commercially ; he invented 
the long D slide valve and was the first to devise an 
oscillating engine. Mozart (1756-1791) was born 
of very poor parents and although for a time, as 
a youthful prodigy, he was petted in Courts, he was 
buried in a pauper's grave, "his funeral being a dis- 
grace to the Court, Emperor, public and society 
itself." Mozart's contributions to the realm of 
music cannot be overestimated. Beethoven (1770- 
1827) , the greatest musician of his day, if not of all 
time, and the founder of modern orchestral music, 
was born in dire poverty, the son of a dissipated 
man of violent passions. His physical disorders, 
including deafness, were caused or aggravated by 
lack of care and food in childhood. Verdi (1813- 



166 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

1901), the Italian musician, was born of peasant 
shopkeepers, yet he became the greatest of Italian 
Opera composers. 

Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), the famous 
English chemist, was the eldest son of a widow with 
five children, left in embarrassed circumstances. At 
sixteen he was working for an apothecary and "set 
out to work on a systematic and remarkably wide 
course of self -instruction. He made many wonder- 
ful discoveries and developed into a man of wide 
interests and sympathies. Coleridge declared that 
if Davy "had not been the first chemist, he would 
have been the first poet of his age." 

George Stephenson (1781-1848), the father of 
the steam locomotive, was the son of a miner and as 
a boy was employed as a cow-herd and later drove 
a gin horse at a colliery. At seventeen, he could 
not read or write. Stephenson made his "chance" 
by sheer hard work; he prepared himself for "op- 
portunities." He began to attend a night school in 
his eighteenth year and study developed his innate 
forces and talents, until he became one of the great- 
est powers in the industrial history of the world. 
Engineering and physical science became his voca- 
tion and farming and horticulture his avocation, 
giving his mind that rich diversity that had much to 
do with his wonderful life success. 

James Hargreaves, who perfected the original 
spinning jenny, was an ignorant weaver of Black- 
burn, England. He was attacked by a mob of his 
fellow workmen who destroyed his models and drove 
him from his home. Like Arkwright, he was born 
and lived for years in poverty and ignorance; but 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 167 

he, as well as the "pot-bellied Lancashire barber," 
made his chance, and the entire world became his 
debtor. John Dalton (1766-1844), the English 
chemist and physician and the father of the Atomic 
Theory, was the son of a poor weaver; the boy ex- 
perienced the dregs and limitations of poverty and 
yet by the exercise of sheer will-power and that 
courage which revels in overcoming obstacles, rose 
to be one of the greatest powers in the realm of 
science. 

Ehas Howe (1819-1867), the inventor of the 
sewing machine, was born in Spencer, Mass- 
achusetts. At sixteen, he left his work as a farm- 
hand and journeyed to Lowell to work in a factory. 
During his years of research and experimentation, 
he experienced the harrowing effects of poverty and 
repeated, persistent, almost heart-breaking discour- 
agements ; but he finally won, and it is said that his 
wife played no small part in Howe's ultimate vic- 
tory and great achievement. Michael Farraday 
(1791-1867) , English chemist and physicist, famous 
for his electrical discoveries, was self-taught. He 
was the sickly son of a poor blacksmith, and when a 
small boy was apprenticed to a bookbinder. Farra- 
day had "no chance" but he fought fate, circum- 
stance and environment and did glorious work in 
understanding and harnessing the forces of nature 
for the perpetual good of mankind. 

Robert Fulton (1765-1815), the famous Ameri- 
can engineer, was born of very poor Irish parents, 
and in his youth worked for a Philadelphia jeweler. 
By handling fate with a strong hand and develop- 
ing the faith within himself, he became a great en- 



168 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

gineer. Fulton built the first successful steam ves- 
sels in this country ; he also experimented with sub- 
marines and invented important machines for spin- 
ning flax, making ropes, sawing and polishing 
marble, etc. He was a man of diversified talents 
and among his many avocations was that of land- 
scape and portrait painting. 

Charles Goodyear struggled for years to make 
rubber of practical use. He and his family suffered 
the pangs of hunger, his neighbors abused him and 
called him insane but he persisted and won. 

"I will take the lightning," said Morse, "that 
Franklin bottled up and harness it to a wire and 
send it careering the world around." Everybody 
laughed and his telegraph was considered the crazy 
scheme of a "crank." A Congressman in Washing- 
ton remarked, "That old fool, Morse, wants me to 
help put a Bill through Congress to stretch a wire 
from Baltimore to Washington, so that one fool in 
Baltimore can talk to some other fool here in Wash- 
ington, forty miles away." The world was amused 
and ridiculed the inventor, but Morse "put a girdle 
around the globe and made thought omnipresent." 

Bell, in 1876, had to encounter the same kind of 
ridicule and badgering, when he suggested the tele- 
phone. Chauncey M. Depew declined to have any- 
thing to do with it, remarking, "It will never be 
more than a plaything for children." The Ameri- 
can sleeping car, when first suggested, was treated 
with contemptuous merriment and branded as 
"Pullman's Folly," just as the railway system be- 
fore had been derided; one so-called authority say- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 169 

ing, "What can be more palpably absurd than the 
prospect held out of a locomotive traveling twice as 
fast as a stage coach?" 

It would be interesting in these days of heavy, 
fast trains and railroad mechanical efficiency to 
see the wiseacres who badgered George Stephenson 
in the British House of Parhament make a tour of 
inspection of a modern railway system, the origina- 
tor of which was the genius whom they persecuted 
for their egoistic amusement. "Suppose a locomo- 
tive were going along a railway at the rate of nine 
miles an hour and suppose a cow should get on the 
track, would not that, think you, be an extremely 
awkward circumstance?" asked one of Stephenson's 
cynical interrogators. "Yes, it would be very awk- 
ward," replied the Father of Railroads — "for the 
cow." 

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the British essayist 
and historian-philosopher, was the son of a poor 
mason and was brought up in strict frugality by 
parents of a very large family with such narrow 
means that they were unable to give him assistance. 
Jean Fran9ois Millet (1814-1875), the great 
French painter, was born of a poor peasant family. 
As a boy he had to work hard and long in the fields, 
but his nearness to nature and an inborn apprecia- 
tion of her beauty had expression in later years 
through his wonderful brush. Millet said that the 
sight of engravings in an old illustrated Bible stim- 
ulated his desire to portray, while others slept, what 
he saw in the fields during the day. 

John Tyndall (1820-1893), the British natural 
philosopher and scientist, was born in poverty and 



170 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

had no early advantage save an indomitable, innate 
eagerness to do something worth while, which he 
encouraged by rare devotion to study, under most 
discouraging circumstances. He was a teacher of 
power and an engineer of marked originality and 
ability. With Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, his 
name is inseparably connected with the battle which 
began in the middle of the nineteenth century for 
making the new standpoint of modern science part 
of the accepted philosophy in general Ufe. 

Handel learned music on an old clavichord, 
hidden in an attic, with the strings muffled with 
cloth; he dared not make any sound that would 
reach the occupants of the house and he found that 
he could only absent himself, without their detec- 
tion, during the hours of the night. The immortal 
Handel, according to world opinion, "had no chance 
to learn his art," but even a persistent illness, cul- 
minating in bUndness, did not prevent his exercising 
it in its fullness. 

America is a land of opportunity and volumes 
could be written of poor boys who have become fa- 
mous by hard work, intelligently applied, in this 
favorable and responsive environment of democracy 
and freedom. Success is not measured by wealth 
but by the doing of something worth while and last- 
ing for the world and one's fellows. Some of the 
best known names of America's "successful" men 
will not appear on Time's Great Roll of Honor, for 
notoriety is not success and the grabbing of wealth 
is not an expression of the creative and hfting spirit 
of life. 

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was a great 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 171 

American, born with apparently "no chance" for 
leaving his imprint on the world. His father was a 
shiftless carpenter-farmer, who could not read or 
write. Abe was brought up in a rude log cabin in 
the then wilderness of Spencer County, Indiana; 
he endured many hardships and knew only the 
primitive manners, conversations and ambitions of 
sparsely settled, back- woods communities. How 
typical of the spirit of mental preparedness for use- 
fulness in life is the picture of the ungainly Lincoln 
youth sprawling on the cabin floor, with the log fire 
illuminating the pages of his book and saying, "I 
will study and prepare myself and then some day 
my chance will come." When nineteen years of 
age Lincoln was a hired hand on a flat boat running 
to New Orleans. When twenty-two he operated a 
little country store and began to study law. A year 
later he was defeated as a candidate for the Legis- 
lature, and his country store failed. In 1833 he did 
odd jobs and had to struggle hard to "procure bread 
to keep body and soul together." Lincoln had no 
"opportunity" offered to him on a silver platter by 
the Goddess Fate, but this simple, tender-hearted, 
patient, cheery, unaffected man, logical, analytical 
and tolerant, with a wonderful judicial mind, rose 
under times of great stress to be the "man of the 
hour," and in his death of martyrdom was mourned 
as America's greatest citizen. Lincoln was never 
academically wise but he had wonderful intuitive 
wisdom. He said that his "education was picked 
up from time to time under the pressure of neces- 
sity." His wisdom was that of the spirit of life — 
it flowed from the universal mind and could not be 



172 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

measured by worldly pedagogical standards. It 
bred conviction, decision, action and with "Malice 
toward none; with charity for all," he suffered as did 
the intuitive God-like Christ eighteen centuries be- 
fore him. 

Wisdom, void of the Cosmic Spirit of the universe, 
is impossible; knowledge is the result of worldly 
authority presented and absorbed in some form or 
other, but wisdom is of the soul and prompts acts 
which contribute to the true benefit and advance of 
mankind toward the Cosmic Goal of perfection. 
Kipling tells us of "the naked soul of Tomlinson" 
before the gate "where Peter holds the keys," when 
conconanded to tell of the "good that he had done for 
the sake of men:" 

"This I have read in a book/' he said, "and that was told to 
me 
And this I have thought that another man thought of a prince 

in Moscovy." 
And Peter twirled his jangling keys in weariness and wrath, 
"Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought" he said, "and 
the tale is yet to run; 
By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer — 
what ha' ye done?" 

Emerson has said, "Talleyrand's question is ever 
the main one; not, *Is he rich?' *Has he this or that 
faculty?' *Is he of the establishment?' but, *Is he 
anybody?' 'Does he stand for something?' " Lin- 
coln stood for something; he was elected to the 
Presidency because of his character, his solid worth ; 
he won success honestly, but what is far greater, he 
used it nobly. 



IX 

MANY of the world's greatest inventions have 
been accredited to accidents; but is it acci- 
dental that a natural occurrence assumes 
special significance to a mind that has been de- 
veloped by hard, persistent work to reason and seek 
to explain the phenomena of nature? It is said 
that the idea of gravitation came to Newton be- 
cause an apple fell on his head. Perhaps. But 
apples had been falling ever since there were apple 
trees, and had probably been falling on men's heads, 
or about them, ever since men had acquired the habit 
of walking or sitting under apple trees. The idea 
of gravitation came to Newton's mind not so much 
from the knock on his head from the falling apple, 
as from the keenly trained observation, and ability 
to see beyond the fact to its cause and effect. This 
power of observation was not due to any over- 
training of the senses, but rather to a finely de- 
veloped connecting system between the senses and 
the judgment seat, that region where intelligence 
dwells. 

The idea of the steam engine is said to have oc- 
curred to Watt while watching a tea-kettle simmer- 
ing on the fire, but how many hundreds of thou- 
sands of men before him had seen steam coming out 
of kettles ? The idea of the pendulum for regulat- 
ing time occurred to Galileo from observing a 

173 



174 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

swinging lantern in the cathedral at Pisa, but great 
numbers of other people had seen other lanterns, 
or the identical same lantern, swinging for ages past. 
In all these cases, certain minds had been prepared 
to note the slight unusual occurrence and carry a 
mental investigation of the matter forward, until a 
law was discovered and an idea or initial notion 
made complete. 

Most of the great discoveries of the world have 
resulted from the attentive observation and intelli- 
gent consideration of little things. We are told 
that the art of printing owes its origin to rude im- 
pressions from the carved bark of beech trees, made 
to amuse little children. Galileo conceived the idea 
of the telescope by observing the children of a 
Dutch spectacle-maker at play, placing glasses be- 
fore each other and looking through the set at some 
distant object. Galvani's observance of the twitch- 
ing of a frog's leg, when in proximity to certain 
metals, led to elaborate research, which culminated 
in the production of the electric telegraph. Young's 
discovery of the diffraction of light is traceable to 
his observation of the colors of soap bubbles which 
a child blew from a clay pipe. Samuel Brown said 
that the idea of a suspension bridge was suggested 
to him by observing a spider's web covered with dew, 
thrown across his garden path. 

A young boy discovered a method of automatic- 
ally operating the valves of a steam engine in order 
to gratify his desire for more time to play. The 
primitive steam engine, as Newcomen conceived it, 
required the presence of a person exclusively em- 
ployed to manipulate the taps by which the steam 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 175 

was let into the cylinder and by which the cold spray 
was injected to condense the steam. The boy, 
tending one of these engines, and desiring to earn 
his wages and at the same time be released from a 
sort of monotonous occupation, conceived the idea 
of tying the handles of the taps by cords to the 
beam of the engine, thus harnessing up the engine 
to work itself by opening and closing the taps. 

Many wonderful discoveries have been made 
when investigators were engaged in endeavoring to 
discover other believedly desirable things. In their 
search for gold, the old alchemists discovered, 
among other things, gunpowder, china, medicines, 
and many laws of nature. Goethe has also pointed 
out that many now world-famous men have been 
like Saul, who found a kingdom while looking for 
his father's asses. 

Eli Whitney, of Massachusetts, went to Savan- 
nah, Georgia, to secure a position as school teacher, 
but meeting Mr. Greene, the owner of a large plan- 
tation and becoming interested in the need of a 
machine to separate the short staple upland cotton 
from its small black seeds, he invented with Yankee 
ingenuity, his famous saw-gin, which tore out the 
seeds with its iron teeth and did fifty men's work 
per day; and under King Cotton, the South com- 
menced a new era of wealth, vigor and prosperity. 
No invention has more profoundly influenced 
American industrial, economic and social history 
than that of young Whitney, who could not find the 
job he wanted as school teacher. 

Michael Angelo saw a man modeling in clay in 
the gardens of Lorenzo and became fired with en- 



176 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

thusiasm and determination to become a sculptor. 
Roger Bacon (1214-1294), trained for the church, 
perceived that "everywhere there was a show of 
knowledge concealing fundamental ignorance." He 
studied the scientific works of Arab writers and 
ridiculed modern experimental research and physi- 
cal science in Christianized Europe, for it had de- 
generated to arguments deduced from false prem- 
ises resting on authority or custom. He was ac- 
cused by the church of dealing in the Black Art, 
was kept under supervision for ten years and suf- 
fered great privation. Later, his books were con- 
demned and he was thrown into prison for fourteen 
years. He was a keen and systematic thinker, with 
a clear conception of science and although a failure 
in his original calling, he lived to be the world's 
greatest experimental scientist, chemist and optician 
of the Middle Ages. 

Socrates, like his father Sophroniscus, was an 
artisan, then a soldier and a statesman, but he found 
himself as a teacher in the market-place at Athens, 
the greatest and the noblest of all the ancient phi- 
losophers. Emerson has called him the "Aesop of 
the mob," and Xenophon said, "You might find him 
wherever the most people were congregated." 

It is very foolish for men to think that they are 
fitted by nature for only one vocation. If such 
should be the case, the laws of destiny must be won- 
derfully effective, for unless one could get into the 
one occupation for which he was fitted and that early 
in life, his entire existence would be a failure. Is 
it not a fact, however, that a job, a position, or a 
profession, i. e., a vocation in life, when decided 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 177 

upon, and when one has become fairly accompHshed 
and automatically efficient in it, results very gener- 
ally in the closing up of almost all parts of the 
brain not directly used in this "bread and butter" 
occupation, with the result that an adult man can 
only do one line of work mentally, as an average 
artisan or skilled mechanic can only do the work 
required by one trade? 

Henry Sherin has said, "Thousands are existing 
upon charity today or depending upon their fami- 
lies because they were compelled to give up their 
vocations on account of ill health or of business de- 
pression. I have seen college professors, clergy- 
men, physicians and lawyers, who were highly ed- 
ucated men, unable to earn a living outside of their 
regular professions and the reason was that they 
had given attention to one subject to the exclusion 
of all others. They stepped into a rut early in 
life and remained in it, mentally and physically, un- 
til they became incapacitated for any other em- 
ployment." 

Many a man may not be able to start life in the 
business or profession which he seems to desire, or 
he may find by experience that the vocation which 
he imagined suited him, is neither congenial nor 
fitting to his peculiar temperament and mental 
faculties. Carnegie was a weaver boy; Lincoln, a 
rail-splitter, and, later, a country storekeeper; 
Rockefeller, a commission clerk at four dollars a 
week ; Andrew Johnson, a tailor ; Sir WilHam Mac- 
Kenzie ran a village sawmill ; Lord Strathcona was 
an Indian trader ; Edison was a newsboy on a train. 
Roger Williams was first a good cobbler, and later a 



178 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

powerful preacher, statesman and champion of free- 
dom. Moliere was not a success as a lawyer, but 
became immortal in literature; Goldsmith was a 
mediocre physician, but he became a great writer, 
winning undying fame with the "Vicar of Wake- 
field." Henry Clay, famous for his passionate ap- 
peals and fervid oratorical abihty, who would "rather 
be right than be President," was "the mill-boy of 
the slashes," and the son of a widowed mother so 
poor that she could not send him to school. Ben- 
jamin Franklin was destined for the ministry, but 
never entered it. He became a soap-maker, and 
then a printer ; later, when he drew electricity from 
the clouds with kites, people sneeringly asked, 
"What use is it?" FrankUn repUed, "What's the 
use of a boy? He may grow into a man." 

Great men have never been discouraged by fail- 
ure, nor by being apparently placed by fate in 
lines of work for which they were not by nature 
adapted, or in which there was but little oppor- 
tunity to achieve great and world-important success. 
Macaulay said, "The world generally gives its ad- 
miration, not to the man who does what nobody else 
attempts to do, but to the man who does best what 
the multitudes do well." Failure in life results 
from not being true to the best one knows and can 
know. Madison C. Peters has said, "Get your am- 
bition fired up. Make things happen, instead of 
waiting for things to turn up. If you sit down and 
wait to be appreciated, you will find yourself un- 
called-for baggage after the Twentieth Century 
Limited has gone by." 

The spirit that does not strive to soar is, by the 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 179 

very nature of things, fated to grovel. Lofty ideals 
and a purpose in life, if backed by an indomitable 
will and whole-hearted energy, will carry one from 
hemmed-in fields of routine nothingness to heights 
of world-service and success. 

"The divine insanity of noble minds. 
That never falters nor abates. 
But labors and endures and waits. 
Till all that it foresees it finds. 
Or what it cannot find, creates." 

— Longfellow. 

Genius surmounts difficulties and makes of ap- 
parently closed, impenetrable barricades, inviting 
gates of opportunity. Lincoln had "no chance" to 
study law, but he walked forty-four miles in one 
day to borrow four large volumes of "Blackstone's 
Commentaries," and walking home he read one hun- 
dred pages. Bunyan wrote his immortal work, 
"Pilgrim's Progress," on the untwisted papers used 
to cork the bottles of milk brought to him in prison. 
Cervantes, imprisoned for debt, wrote part of Don 
Quixote on scraps of leather. Lord Eldon, Eng- 
land's great Chief Justice, was so poor that he could 
not buy law books, so he borrowed and copied sev- 
eral large volumes. Fawcett, England's Postmas- 
ter General and Professor of Political Economy at 
Cambridge; Herreshoif, the designer of world- 
famous yachts; Handel, the great composer; and 
Milton, an immortal writer, were blind. Robert 
Louis Stevenson, Mozart, Beethoven, Carlyle, 
Farraday, Darwin, Spencer and Heine all suffered 
from ill-health, but they left an indelible imprint 
on the world. 



180 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Most men who achieve success in life begin to 
show their "class" by embracing the first reason- 
able opportunity that presents itself to them and 
by putting their utmost into whatever job may be 
given them to do. The experience of every man is 
a part of his education that can be capitalized, for 
no employment is so menial or association so barren 
and stupid as not to offer food to a receptive young 
mind with ideas. Moreover, one can learn from the 
"not to do's" of life fully as much at times as from 
the "what to do's," and wherever men are employed 
there are facilities for profitable study. Sherin 
writes, "Very few bank presidents have started life 
in financial institutions and railway magnates have 
often come up from the ordinary laboring classes. 
When young, they all attended the school of honest, 
hard toil, which developed their bodies, trained their 
minds and established their characters on good, 
healthy foundations, which fitted them for the 
greater future duties they were to assume." 

Doing things well will result in a measure of suc- 
cess; doing things better assures a greater degree 
of success; but doing things best, no matter how 
relatively trivial the importance of the work may 
seem to be, commands positive success. Emerson 
says that the man who makes nothing more than 
rat-traps, but makes a better rat-trap than anybody 
else, will find a beaten path to his door. And again 
he says, "The crowning fortune of a man is to be 
born to some pursuit which finds him in employ- 
ment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, 
or broad-swords, or canals, or statues, or songs." 
If a man is not engaged in any line of work which 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 181 

"finds him in employment and happiness," 'tis not 
the stars or fate that can be blamed if he refuses to 
bestir himself and find a field in which his talents, 
few or many, may be better used; or else rub the 
mist from his eyes and shake the cobwebs from his 
brain and seek to find in his setting and environ- 
ment an opportunity for growth and service. Bee- 
thoven's favorite maxim was, "The barriers are not 
erected which can say to aspiring talents and in- 
dustry, 'thus far and no farther.' " 

Many a man's life has been a failure, due to blind- 
ness to perceive opportunities at hand, his days be- 
ing spent in wandering over the earth looking for 
"big" things, which, if found, would have proven to 
be small compared with the great fields waiting 
nearer home. A Cahfornia farmer sold his farm 
for a song to journey north, to his death, in the 
quest of gold; whereas his httle cabin stood on the 
banks of a stream which, by placer mining, has pro- 
duced more gold than his imagination could ever 
have conceived. A Pennsylvania farmer sold his 
farm to enter the oil business in Canada; the scum 
on the creek of his farm, which his cows refused to 
drink, and which he believed ruined his property, 
was, in reahty, oil from flowing wells, that he went 
far afield to seek. He failed to make his fortune in 
the far-away Northland, but his old farm is today 
one of the richest oil-producing lands in the country. 

The Wanderlust, when controlled, is necessary in 
the production of pioneers to explore and develop 
the resources of a new country, but it is just as apt 
in these days to be the siren's call, responsible for 
failures which ultimately become allied with aim- 



182 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

lessness, lack of concentration and indefiniteness — 
a rolling stone gathering no moss. On the other 
hand, as Lowell has said, "Every man is born with 
his business or profession in him," and one should 
have the personality, moral courage and decision 
to change one's occupation, or even one's setting, 
if necessary, in order that one's life work may be 
performed. "To business that we love, we rise be- 
times to go to it with dehght." To do work that 
we know we can do well, and to do that which our 
souls desire to do, is to be happy and taste the 
fruits of success. 

No power on earth can keep a real man and his 
work apart, and "Nobody can cheat you out of ul- 
timate success but yourself." Daniel Webster's 
father insisted that his son become a farmer, but 
the future expounder and defender of our Consti- 
tution hung up his scythe on a tree in disgust. He 
was determined to obtain schooHng and become a 
lawyer. When remonstrated vdth and told that the 
legal profession was overcrowded, he retorted, 
"That may be in numbers, but there's always room 
at the top." He succeeded in his ambition, but was 
so poor during the years of sacrifice necessary for 
the realization of his dreams, that when at Dart- 
mouth College a friend sent him some grease for his 
boots, he laughingly thanked his donor, but added, 
"My boots need other doctoring than grease to 
make them water-tight — they admit even gravel 
stones." 

The father of John Adams was determined to 
make his son a shoemaker. Ole Bull was beaten by 
his father for playing the violin, but still he played. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 183 

Genius within a child cannot be stifled by being 
branded as "perversion," and cannot be either last- 
ingly suppressed or forced out by blows or ostra- 
cism. Schiller loved poetry with all his heart, but 
was forced by his father to practice surgery. Sen- 
sitive and unfitted for the work, Schiller suffered in- 
tensely, and until he abandoned surgery and turned 
to literature, his nature was starved. To use 
Schiller as a surgeon, it has been well said, "was 
like using a razor as a chisel." 

Joshua Reynolds, one of the founders of the Brit- 
ish Royal Academy, incurred parental displeasure 
of the most positive kind, because he would not do 
with good grace what his father insisted upon as 
necessary for Joshua's success in life. Finding his 
son making a sketch one day, the father in wrath 
severely censured the boy and badly scribbled on 
the drawing, "Done by Joshua, out of pure idle- 
ness." Sir Joshua Reynolds was a great believer 
in the power and achievements of purposeful in- 
dustry and even held that "excellence in art, how- 
ever expressed by genius, may be acquired." What 
some people consider "idleness" may be true work, 
and much that passes for work in the world today 
might rather be branded as idleness or worse than 
idleness. 

Industry is as necessary for success in the world 
as genius, and who can separate, in the aggregate 
of achievement, enthusiastic work and energetic, 
self-sacrificing effort from inspiration? The very 
spirit of real work — enthusiasm — signifies the God 
within. George Eliot, who, according to Cross' 
biography, "had a great genius for taking pains," 



184 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

is said to have read a thousand volumes and spent 
many years of hard, exacting work in the produc- 
tion of "Daniel Deronda." Prof. Maria Mitchell, 
the famous astronomer, said, as she reached the end 
of a marvelous career, "I was born with only ordi- 
nary capacity, but with extraordinary persistency." 
Goethe, most industrious and wise, said of one of his 
ballads, "Years of reflection are comprised in it, 
and I made four trials before I could bring it to its 
present shape." 

Leonardo da Vinci, the world's greatest univer- 
sal genius, is said to have devoted ten years to the 
model of an equestrian statue, in order that he 
might perfect his knowledge of the anatomy of a 
horse; we are also told that the painting of Mona 
Lisa, with its wonderful head, occupied four years. 
Michael Angelo studied human anatomy for twelve 
years, and spent seven years decorating the Sistine 
Chapel with his wonderful mural paintings. Dur- 
ing this time he refused to meet any people socially, 
saying, "art is a jealous mistress, she requires the 
whole man." Giardine said that it required "twelve 
hours' work a day for twenty years" before he felt 
that he could play the violin. 

Gibbon worked twenty years on his great book, 
"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." 
Macaulay wrote his best essays three times. Hume 
labored hard, amidst great discouragements, thir- 
teen hours a day for thirteen years to write his 
"History of England." Adam Smith required 
seventeen years to produce his "Wealth of Nations," 
and Webster spent thirty-six years on his diction- 
ary. It is said that Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 185 

about a hundred times and Plato wrote part of his 
"Republic" nine times before he was satisfied with 
it. Dickens, when asked on one occasion to read 
from certain of his writings in public, said that he 
was compelled to dechne, as he had not sufficient 
time to prepare himself, for to read a piece satis- 
factorily, he had found by experience, required two 
readings a day for six months before he could de- 
liver it in public. 

Determination and industry will overcome ap- 
parently insurmountable barriers. Demosthenes, 
of old, hissed and hooted as a stutterer, went to the 
beach, placed pebbles in his mouth, and practised 
shouting to the rocks and talking before a mirror 
until he was acclaimed the greatest orator of his 
day. 

It is a worthy ambition to do one's best, to per- 
form each important task as if it were one's master- 
piece. An old sculptor was praised for an ex- 
quisitely finished work, with the minutest details 
apparently perfect, as a result of long and earnest 
work and study. His comment was, "the gods will 
see." Edward Everett Hale well said, "The safe 
path to excellence and success in every calling is 
that of appropriate preliminary education, diligent 
application to learn the art, and assiduity in prac- 
tising it." Work, Industry, Apphcation, Concen- 
tration, Thoroughness and Energetic Enthusiasm 
defy failure and assure success in every field of 
legitimate endeavor. 



X 

1IFE is a struggle to achieve one's self and one's 
J mission ; a successful life utilizes one's forces 
and improves one's opportunities in har- 
mony with the great Cosmic purpose. "Life," said 
Hippocrates, "is short, art is long, opportunity 
fleeting, experiment uncertain and judgment diffi- 
cult." To make a living is not necessarily to live; 
making a living is only a means to living, while the 
most important thing in life is to learn how to live. 
Life is really at an end when growth of mind and 
spirit ceases, even if physical existence continues. 
To live, it has been aptly said, is not "simply stay- 
ing above the ground." Life is not merely breath- 
ing, or even moving, for one can breathe, enjoy 
circulation, locomotion and the functions of the 
prime physical senses and yet, with tired and trem- 
bling limbs, leaning wearily upon a staff, keep mov- 
ing steadily and tapping, tapping upon the cold 
brown earth, that, in the words of Chaucer, it may 
the sooner open to receive us. A man may live a 
busy, persistently strenuous business life, or be an 
active mechanic in a shop, yet the narrow vision and 
automatic existence of both, untouched by the spirit- 
ual forces and humanities of life, may cause his 
steps to be mere "tapping, tapping upon the cold 
brown earth." 

Life is what we make it and our usefulness to the 

187 



188 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

world is gauged by the measure of soul, social pur- 
pose and energetic effort, rightly directed, that we 
put into it. If we have no imagination, no vision, 
no ideal, no Cosmic goal, no hope, no guiding intui- 
tion, we are dead. If we labor with only sordid 
purpose, if we struggle to grasp only materialistic 
rewards, we are slaves and receive as compensation 
for our physical labor merely the wherewithal to 
continue our existence, in order that we may per- 
form more toil. If we work, we become allied with 
God in purpose and in spirit, for a worker must 
needs have imagination and a soul in contact with 
the great Cosmic Forces of progress and world- 
achievement. 

Life should mean to us far more than food, 
clothes and shelter; it should suggest the develop- 
ment of psychical powers, the expansion of the true 
inner self to the greatest possible degree of world 
usefulness and the steady, persistent moving toward 
some central aim. Every man should have a voca- 
tion in life, in which he contributes relatively much 
or little to world progress. A vocation is a man's 
business, his trade, a necessary economic activity 
which, when faithfully pursued, supplies, as recom- 
pense for work performed, the wherewithal neces- 
sary for life, food, clothes, shelter, etc. A vocation 
should, however, mean far more than this and no 
work well done can be performed animal-like or 
machine-like. 

Many men function at their vocations like ma- 
chines : they are cranked up in the morning and run 
down at night ; they are given to action rather than 
thought. Holmes has hkened a man's brain to a 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 189 

70-year clock, with the wheels of thought producing 
a monotonous tick-tock through life. Life, to such 
men, if they would but turn the search-light of 
honest inquiry upon themselves, would reveal a con- 
dition well expressed by Mantalini at the wash-tub 
mangier, in Dickens* Nicholas Nickleby, "I am 
turning, I am perpetually turning, like a demned 
old horse in a demnition mill. My life is one 
demned horrid grind." Life is commonplace and 
will always remain commonplace to human automa- 
tons and commonplace people, but life is not a judg- 
ment to drudgery and soulless, meaningless monot- 
ony. It is a glory, a dignity, an opportunity. 

Man, in reality, cannot be a machine, for no 
machine is responsible, whereas man is a free and 
responsible agent and can do as he pleases or wills. 
Unless a man feels that his work is worth while, he 
cannot truly live. The most prosaic vocation can 
be glorified by vision and ennobled by the spirit of 
service. Charles Ferguson has said, "It is the note 
of man as distinguished from the beasts, that he 
can, by conscious effort, better his standing in the 
material world. Characteristically, a man is a 
worker, a creator of values, a world-maker; he, 
alone, of all living things, can conceive, design and 
execute them, can imagine conditions that do not 
exist, and then, by patience, bring them to pass. 
To take the world wholly as one finds it and leave 
it so, is brutal. A man is a man only because he 
is a wealth producer and enricher of existence." 

True culture, mental balance and sanity, which 
place things in their proper relation, come from 
work performed in the true spirit of service. Griggs 



190 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

has said that "Work is worth just the measure of 
manhood and womanhood expressed in it — never 
more and, we may be thankful, never less;" and 
again, referring to the difference in the spirit with 
which men apply themselves to their vocations, he 
says, "One man wiU settle down into the routine 
of his calling, digging the ruts deeper each day 
until he quite loses power to see out from them; 
another, in the same vocation, shows an ability to 
make each day's work a source of new growth in 
power and in appreciation." 

A man's efforts and usefulness in life are not 
limited to achievements in his vocation, whether it 
be voluntarily selected or apparently forced upon 
him by circumstances over which he believes or im- 
agines he has no control. Every man may have 
avocations aside from his business or vocation in 
life. Avocations are self-selected interests and call 
upon one's "margin of time" or one's "leisure." It 
has been well said that "the use of the margin goes 
far in determining the ultimate success or failure 
in the business of life." It is surprising to find that 
the most useless lives are those automatic, spinal- 
cord actuated existences which profess to have no 
margin of time, no period for the acquisition and 
exercise of avocations. The routine toiler, void of 
vision, claims that he has no leisure or margin of 
time to improve himself, broaden his interests, de- 
velop innate talents and by so doing, increase his 
usefulness in the world. 

The true worker has time; he feels the need of 
time, and even if he works at his vocation much 
longer hours than the mechanistic toiler, he finds 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 191 

time to do the things his nature demands and seeks 
to express. The panacea for a life overburdened 
with routine is more work, i. e., different, interesting 
and appealing, worth-while work, and the stress of 
the enlarged mental life will be far less than that 
of the narrower, restricted and irksome existence. 
There is an old legend that a man once went up 
among the high mountains and asked of the gods 
what reward there might be for all the pain, dis- 
appointments, perplexities and the labor of life. A 
great voice threw back to him the Cosmic answer, 
"The Labor of Life;" but the man, thinking that 
it was only an echo, descended again to the valleys, 
sorrowing, unenlightened and unsatisfied. 

Whittier says, "Take from our lives the strain 
and stress." Should not man cast from his mind 
those conditions which make for weariness, defeat 
and failure and acquire or develop interests which 
open the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and permit 
unrestricted flow of Cosmic Forces to the intuitive 
and spiritual senses of the soul? The Puritan fore- 
fathers and the old ascetics held that a duty must 
be hard to perform and repugnant to the doer be- 
cause it ought to be done. Disagreeableness, to 
their minds, seemed to make the act virtuous, just 
as the bitterer the herb, the greater its supposed 
efficacy in overcoming disease. Duty is not the 
doing of that which is hard and hateful; it is more 
apt to be the doing of that which is hard, but which 
one loves. 

There is a universal law of individuality as well 
as a law of growth and achievement. The real man 
knows himself and understands his innate powers; 

\ 



192 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

he forms purposes of his own in harmony with his 
forces and pursues them steadily to the goal. His 
great duty in life is to express his distinctive per- 
sonality to the world and in the development and 
expression of one's real, inner self lies happiness. 

True success lies in steadily and persistently 
aiming at the bull's-eye of one's purpose, refusing 
to drift into the narrow routine of life. The strug- 
gle must be directed toward attaining the true art 
of living and obtaining the inner wisdom of true 
values and worthy purposes. 

"To smother care with joy, and grief with laughter. 
To hold the present close, not questioning the hereafter. 
To see the sun sink in the west, without regretting. 
To hail its advent in the east — ^the night forgetting, 
To have enough to spare — to know the joy of giving. 
To thrill response to every good of life, — that's living." 

The great thing in life is man's mental attitude 
toward his work. Unless he is an artist and per- 
forms his work in the world, no matter how humble 
it may be, in a spirit of devotion and earnestness, he 
fails to fulfil his destiny. Ruskin said that it does 
not matter whether a man "paint the petal of a rose 
or the chasm of a precipice, so that love and admira- 
tion attend on him as he labors and waits forever 
on his work. It does not matter whether he toils 
for months on a few inches of his canvas or covers 
a palace front with color in a day, so only that it be 
with a solemn purpose that he has filled his heart 
with patience or urged his hand to haste." The 
great thing in work is reverence for the appointed 
task and the consecration of one's whole being in 
the determination to do the work, not only fittingly 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 193 

and well, but in the best and most complete manner 
that is hmnanly possible. 

Genius is the art of taking infinite pleasure in 
one's work. Genius is immortality and man be- 
comes immortal through his work; but only that 
work in which a man takes infinite pleasure may 
hope to retain its identity and continue as an entity 
throughout eternity. Man's mission in life is not 
to attempt impossible tasks and waste his time in 
futile efforts to solve the problems of the universe, 
but to find out what he can do and then do that thing 
well ; to develop himself by education to the utmost 
and express his personality and individualistic pow- 
ers within the limits of his comprehension and en- 
dowment. Happiness comes to every man who 
finds his work, and religion fills the soul of every 
man who loves his work. A man's duty to the 
world, his God and his fellow man is to vitalize his 
environment, use all the powers and skill that have 
been given him and carve his message and his per- 
sonality with all his enthusiasm and might into the 
heart of the world about him. Michael Angelo 
wrote, four centuries ago: 

"The stone, unhewn and cold 
Becomes a living mold. 
The more the marble wastes. 
The more the statue grows." 

The soul in man, if given full and free oppor- 
tunity for expression, will vitalize and glorify any 
work and the more of one's self, the more of devotion 
and energy one puts into the work, the greater be- 
comes the development, happiness and gratification 



194 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

of the inner man. A real worker is a Pygmalion 
to whose work the gods give the breath of hf e. 

Man was made not only to be active and useful, 
but to cultivate all of his faculties in harmony with 
the Cosmic Spirit of progress. He was meant to 
grow, never to stand still. To succeed requires 
method, perseverance and concentration, but one 
must learn when to remove as well as apply mental 
pressure. Griggs has said, "Ceaseless effort is 
mediocrity, evaded effort is self-deception, rightly 
balanced effort is the key to genius. To drive one- 
self with relentless will, then let go and respond 
with open, care-free mind and heart — these together 
are great living; either, alone, means hopeless de- 
terioration." 

The mind, during the day's period of wakeful- 
ness, should be active, for such is its nature; there- 
fore, it should be utilized and directed. A change 
of thought is rest and in such rest or apparent re- 
laxation, productivity is quite possible. The men- 
tal power required by avocations may and should 
completely rest the parts of the brain that have been 
concentrated for hours upon one's vocation. The 
mind should, however, be free at times for reflec- 
tion and contemplation, if there be mental capacity; 
for "such resource," it has been well said, "is a mark 
of the highest cultivation." It is, however, dan- 
gerous for any mind to browse upon itself unless 
the windows of the soul are opened to the sunshine 
of Cosmic Truth and the mind has direct contact 
with the realities of life and the totality of things. 
A brain wandering in a labyrinth of darkness be- 
comes as blind as a mole grubbing in the ground. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 195 

Men have become brilliant writers and poets, 
learned scientists and philosophers, gifted artists, 
great chemists, engineers and inventors by using to 
advantage their "margin of time," or so-called spare 
and leisure moments, turning "the hours that 
might have been wasted into coins for future use." 
William Cullen Bryant, one of the earliest of our 
American poets, paid running expenses in the busi- 
ness of life by working at his newspaper desk day 
after day in New York, but the poetry by which 
he will always be remembered was written in those 
spare moments of time that most people waste. 
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher and econ- 
omist, earned money to sustain life by working 
six days per week for thirty-five years at clerical 
work, confined at a desk in the office of the East 
India Company, in London. All the great liter- 
ary work of this man, which can scarcely be over- 
estimated in its effect upon the world, was per- 
formed in those spare or leisure moments which 
most people waste and many deliberately try to kill. 
Matthew Arnold, the great English poet and liter- 
ary critic, was, from 1851 to 1886, employed in the 
Education Department of the British Government 
as a school inspector and his literary work repre- 
sents an avocation pursued in such intervals of 
"leisure" as could be spared from most exacting 
public service. 

Sir Thomas Brown lived an active life as a Brit- 
ish provincial practitioner. In his spare time he 
turned to literature. His first book was printed 
without his consent, yet it has been said that "there 
is no writer of English prose whose name has 



196 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

greater assurance of that immortality of fame he 
mocked at." Charles Lamb, the essayist, spent his 
days in a South Sea Counting House, transferring 
figures from one ledger to another, but in his "mar- 
gin of time," during evening hours, the great man's 
magnetic personality and deep humanity asserted 
themselves and were fittingly expressed to the world. 
This is the man who may have instinctively dishked 
a person whom he had never met, but who had such 
a faculty of obtaining points of contact with men 
that his words, "I can't hate a fellow I know," have 
become famous, as well as indicative of real human- 
ism. Wordsworth was a Government employee, and, 
with his sister, lived for many years on a salary of 
$7.50 per week; the great poet often said that this 
period of relative poverty, when the strictest econ- 
omy had to be exercised in order that the necessities 
of life could be obtained, was one of the happiest 
and most wholesome periods of his life. Haw- 
thorne was a Custom House inspector; Balzac, an 
unsuccessful publisher and Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
a doctor. 

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the son of a 
poor baker, was a Polish physician, devoted to his 
profession and subject to call day and night; yet he 
found time to elaborate a system of astronomy, by 
the adaptation of which man's outlook upon the 
universe was fundamentally changed. He "per- 
forated the walls of his humble dwelling that he 
might note the stars in their passage, keeping 
for years the momentous secret in his bosom, lest 
the stake be his destiny." Benjamin Huntsman 
(1704-1776), the inventor of cast steel, was a poor 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 197 

English watch-maker. John Locke (1632-1704), 
the founder of English Sensationalism and the 
Philosophy of Relativity, was a student of medicine 
and a layman. Heinrich Schlieman, the foremost 
archaeologist of his day, sold sauerkraut and herring 
in a small German village, but so improved the 
spare moments which his business offered, that at 
forty years of age he was a noted linguist, and, re- 
tiring from a trade in which he had been quite suc- 
cessful, he was enabled to devote his energies to 
scientific research and the free development of his 
wonderful talents. Sir John Lubbock became one 
of the world's highest authorities on pre-historic 
archaeology by the use of his "leisure time" when 
freed from his arduous mercantile responsibilities. 
Most of the great generalizations in Physics have 
been made by men whose time was well occupied by 
the demands of their vocation, yet in their margin of 
time they found opportunities for doing immortal 
work for the world. Robert Mayer, the discoverer 
of the law of the conservation of energy, was a 
physician ; Carnot, the founder of thermo-dynamics, 
an engineer; Joule, who first gave the mechanical 
equivalent of heat, was a brewer, and it was Joseph 
Priestley, a theologian and philosopher, who dis- 
covered oxygen. Photography has been developed 
far more by the dabblings and interest of ama- 
teurs than by the research efforts of skilled pro- 
fessionals and specialists. As we study the lives of 
the men responsible for the industrial revolution of 
Great Britain, we find that most of the great in- 
ventions were made by men utilizing to its fulness, 
with enthusiasm and vision, their "margin of time." 



198 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Herbert Spencer has truly said that the education 
which made England what she has been during the 
past century, "got itself taught in nooks and cor- 
ners," and he might fittingly have added "in spare 
moments and by candle-light." 

To kill time is to murder opportunity. In one 
respect, we each have a definite and uniform income 
where all mankind is placed upon a level plane of 
absolute equality; twenty- four hours per day in- 
come is granted to each of us by the Law of the Uni- 
verse. Time is the raw material of all life. Its full 
value, like the full value of money, is realized, not 
by hoarding it, but by spending it for what will 
bring the greatest return. How are we spending 
it? We can save it only by using it, and proper 
use brings dividends which give satisfaction and real 
pleasure as well as benefits to the world. The way 
one uses the margin of time, it has been well said, 
shows the line of movement of the mind and soul 
and reveals the ideal. He who lives most, thinks 
most clearly. His life is gauged by thoughts and 
his usefulness by the transference of his thoughts 
into deeds. Life must be measured by depth, 
rather than length, by intensity and completeness, 
thought and action, rather than by time; by hours, 
days and years utilized rather than by periods 
passed. Dante said, "For he who knows most, him 
the loss of time most grieves." 

A life is noble or ignoble, depending upon the 
spirit which actuates it and not upon the vocation 
adopted; upon its appreciation and the fullest use 
of its faculties and opportunities and not upon its 
bank-book, worldly notoriety and emulation. Time 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 199 

is precious; neglect of opportunities for service is 
as serious as neglect and atrophy of innate powers. 

"Life is too short to waste. 
*Twill soon be dark; 
Up! Mind thine own aim, and 
God speed the mark!" 

— Emerson. 

We really make ourselves what we wish to be, 
and a life without a worth-while work, useful in- 
terests and time well spent is useless. Ruskin 
says that such a life is guilt that brings its own 
punishment. Yet the vast majority of men dream 
contentedly on ; mere automatons, spending certain 
hours to acquire money, while they waste the golden 
opportunities for world service and mind develop- 
ment in their "leisure" moments. Moreover, in 
their vocation, time might be immeasurably inten- 
sified and glorified by imagination, ideals and 
worthy purpose. There is no limit to the oppor- 
tunities that can be discovered by the growing, wide- 
awake man of keen thought and vision, but to the 
average salary or wage-earner, life is a monotonous 
journey of routine and drudgery, with the days 
dropping one by one into oblivion. 

Seneca, the Roman philosopher and statesman, 
said, "We all complain of the shortness of time, 
and yet we have more than we know what to do 
with. Our lives are spent either in doing nothing 
at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in 
doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always 
complaining that our days are few and acting as 
though there would be no end to them." 

Some men live, others exist ; to live with twice the 



200 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

significance is worth as much or more to the world 
than living twice as long. Some of the greatest 
lives in history have been short in years. A modern 
educator has well said that to spend two hours on 
a lesson means nothing — the important matter is, 
"How much intelligent, concentrated energy did 
you spend upon it?" Men vary from each other in 
their length of days, but they also differ immensely 
with respect to intensity of living; and the latter, 
in its effect upon the world, is probably far more 
important, in regard to worth-while progress and 
achievement, than the former. A real man would 
rather live a year than vegetate for a century. 

Each man born into the world has peculiar indi- 
vidualistic faculties ; they are his initial capital, and 
with these he must do business in hf e. The river of 
time flows steadily but inexorably by, whether we 
work or are idle, see or are blind, struggle to achieve 
or with indolence fall into letharg^^ or degenerate 
into hopeless despair. "It is only while the water 
of the river of time flows over the mill-wheel of to- 
day's life that we can utihze it. Once it is past, 
it is in the great unreturning sea of eternity." Each 
day, each hour, presents opportunity, great or 
small, for the use of our individualistic capital, for 
its growth, and for the development of one's power, 
talents and character. Goethe has well said, "Do 
not wait for extraordinary opportunities for good 
actions, but make use of common situations. A 
long continued walk is better than a short flight." 
And Gladstone said, "Thrift of time will repay you 
in after life with a usury of profits beyond your 
most optimistic dreams; while the waste of it will 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 201 

make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and moral 
stature, beyond your darkest reckonings." 

Nature abhors uniformity as she does a vacuum. 
She crowns the individual and refuses to reduce all 
mankind to a common level. Progress is realized 
by differences encouraged by the forces of life to 
greater differences. Innate powers, intelligent 
effort and the utilization of time are all important 
factors in world achievement. If two men are 
equal in mental endowment and energy and one 
works twelve hours a day and the other eight, equal- 
ity of the men as world forces ceases. If each works 
ten hours a day at similar vocations and one spends 
two or three hours a day engaged in interesting 
avocations, his power will grow with leaps and 
bounds; his value to the world wiU be far greater 
than that of his fellow, and his mental work in diver- 
sified avocational fields will increase his vocational 
ability; thus he will outstrip his colleague who be- 
lieves in work and rest, i. e., ten hours' work and the 
balance of the day, aside from enjoyment of family 
and desirable social life, occupied in the usual kill- 
time fashion which is mental rust — not rest. 

The proper distinguishing, grading and relative 
placing of duties and opportunities that occur in a 
day are a fine art, and man can with profit study to 
know how to distinguish that which is important 
from that which is relatively unimportant ; and that 
which should take precedence from that which is 
subordinate to a well-balanced, effective life. We 
rightly criticise Pietro Medici for employing the 
immortal genius of Michael Angelo to make a 
statue out of frozen snow, yet we refuse to see that 



202 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

if Angelo's time was precious to the world, our time 
is as precious to ourselves and was ordained to be of 
some use to the world. Are we spending our time 
chiselling in solid granite or are we utilizing 
our forces merely to make statues of snow or 
idols of mire? 



XI 

GOETHE said that life lies before us as a huge 
quarry lies before the architect. He de- 
serves not the name of architect except 
when, out of this fortuitous mass, he can combine 
with the greatest economy, fitness and durabihty, 
some forms, the patterns of which originated in his 
spirit. All things without and about us are mere 
elements — externals, but deep within us lies the 
creative force which out of these can produce what 
they were meant to be. Thomas has said that "The 
force that drives a man to any goal he has before 
him, is personal power. It is the divine part of 
man that gives him domination over the earth and 
over himself. It is something more than intelli- 
gence, because it makes a man use his intelligence 
in the right way. It is something more than char- 
acter, for it creates character. It is something 
more than personahty, because a man's personality 
is but an expression of the mind." 

Environment does not make a man, but it may 
tend to retard or stimulate his growth. A man's 
capacity for worth-while thought and intelligent 
effort is almost always inversely proportionate to 
the amount of stimulus furnished by his environ- 
ment, which, however, is greatly affected by the 
man's relation and general attitude to his environ- 
ment. Environment is to life what wind, tide and 

203 



204 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

weather are to the saihng craft. Adverse winds 
do not stop progress, but they demand that the 
real guiding power within the boat utihze his 
power and skill in tacking against head winds, as 
well as in running free before fair winds and hold- 
ing up and pointing well with wind abeam. The 
environment tends to regulate, but man alone 
strives, selects and adapts. To be successful is to 
utihze personal power in its fulness. Did not 
Aristotle have this in mind when he said, "To be 
happy, means to be self-sufficient" — not self-satis- 
fied, but one in whom dwells part of the great 
Cosmic Spirit of life which we designate as God? 

The happiest people in the world are the busiest, 
— engaged in worth-while pursuits. Bishop Cum- 
berland (1632-1718) , defending his incessant appli- 
cation to mental activity, made famous the saying, 
"It is better to wear out than to rust out." Great 
achievement may be reahzed by constant applica- 
tion, but the mind is benefited, strengthened and 
refreshed by change of thought, by the turning 
from one line of activity to another without wasteful 
friction; thus inertia is not necessary for rest; and 
avocations which interest and stimulate are refresh- 
ing for a mind working for hours in a deep brain 
rut of routine. 

One of the industrious Goethe's maxims was, 
"Work without haste and without rest," but our word 
"rest" does not exactly express his idea. Ameri- 
cans, more than any other people on earth, need to 
heed and reflect upon Goethe's advice to work hard 
and efficiently without nervous and wearing hurry; 
without fuss and undue anxiety; without that 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 205 

strenuosity in the wake of which follow the waste 
of rest, dissipation and time lost in the recuperation 
of physical powers. 

"Haste notj let no thoughtless deed 
Mar for aye the spirit's speed; 
Ponder well, and know the right, 
Onward then, and know thy might; 
Haste not, years can ne'er atone 
For one reckless action done. 

"Rest not. Life is sweeping by. 
Go and dare, before you die; 
Something mighty and sublime 
Leave behind to conquer time; 
Glorious 'tis to live for aye. 
When these forms have pass'd away.'* 

Mental idleness is not rest. It is apt to develop 
mental laziness and prove more tiring than work. 
The old Romans had a proverb, "It is difficult to 
rest if you are doing nothing." The miserable peo- 
ple in the world are never the busy workers; they 
are not the active, up-struggling poor, but rather 
the blase, world-weary, down-gravitating people 
who, ignoring opportunities and courting idleness, 
spend their useless lives "going over the face of the 
earth vainly seeking to escape the shadow of their 
own disgust." Griggs has said that "he who fails 
to contribute in some form to society as much as 
he takes from it, has failed of ordinary honesty and 
is to be regarded as a pauper or a thief, whatever 
his wealth may be." 

The pessimists of the world are the sick, the im- 
mature, the unbalanced and the ignorant. The first 
class should be considered pathologically, although 



206 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

their ailments may be caused or augmented by men- 
tal derangement, hallucination and lopsidedness. 
The youthful pessimist, if he keeps his health and 
lives a normal span of years, will become better 
poised and regain vision and sanity, for such is a 
law of life. All the world's pessimists gifted with 
brains have either died young or outgrown their 
pessimism. The busy and the poor are generally 
optimistic; the idle rich find life boresome and de- 
generate to pessimism and despair. There has 
never been a great pessimist in all the ages who, at 
any time in his life, had to earn his living by the 
work of his own hands. "Work brings one so close 
to the hard, beneficent laws of nature that one does 
not doubt the sanity of the universe at the heart." 
John Wesley constantly admonished his hearers in 
the interest of their highest welfare, "Never be un- 
employed, never be triflingly employed, never while 
away time." 

Work creates a true aristocracy in life. We have 
heard much of the "dignity of labor" from capital- 
istic platforms of patronage and exploitation. There 
is no dignity in labor; it has to be raised to the 
plane of worth-while work with the exercise of men- 
tal faculties before it gains dignity and respect and 
enters the domain of Cosmic usefulness. William 
Gray, who achieved a position of wealth, influence 
and usefulness, on one occasion reproved a work- 
man for poor work; smarting under the deserved 
censure, the man retorted, "You needn't put on airs 
to me; I can remember when you were only Billy 
Gray, a poor fiddler." "You both tell the truth 
and lie," replied Gray. "It is true that I was a 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 207 

fiddler, and poor, but did I not fiddle well? I was 
never a poor workman with my fiddle, hence I have 
greater responsibilities today and my whole being 
loathes poor work of any kind." Here was a man 
raised to an aristocracy of work by doing every 
menial duty well and in the spirit of a true artist. 
Doing work well commands respect and wins suc- 
cess. Work performed grudgingly is never well 
done and becomes dishonest labor, fraudulently sub- 
stituted for honest work. Dishonest labor is steal- 
ing, and shirkers are thieves, doomed by their own 
ignorance to failure and the harrowing treadmill of 
drudgery. Cervantes well said, "Every man is the 
son of his own works." 

Resistance to the down-currents of useless living 
and up-struggle against the surging obstructions 
to progress, develop character and make for success. 
It takes a Siegfried to triumph over the flames sur- 
rounding a Brunhilda ; it takes the courage and en- 
thusiasm of a hero to overcome the subtle and ap- 
parently insurmountable hindrances decreed by 
what we term Fate. The world advances by up- 
struggle on the part of the individual and not by 
uplift on the part of a self-appointed few. Every 
man must develop himself and work out his own 
salvation. Opportunity gives a man his chance, but 
opportunity is seldom an open road ahead; it is 
rather an opportune or seasonable time to fight, 
hurdle an obstruction and courageously encounter 
resistance, with the possibility of overcoming if the 
fight is well fought. No hf e that is worth the living 
and is of service to the world can be likened to a 
locomotive on level railway trackage, where unseen 



208 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

hands manipulate switches and direct which steel 
pathway of the many shall be traversed. Life re- 
quires for us far more than sitting in a locomotive 
cab, or merely attending to the required expenditure 
and utilization of fuel, water and steam ; it demands 
more than the mere watching and automatic obedi- 
ence to signals. 

Each individual is an ego from which radiates a 
vast multiplicity of possible roads; the up-grade 
ones lead to useful service, the level ones to the 
relative nothingness of mediocrity, and the down- 
grade ones to oblivion. The great achievements in 
life are usually found at the end of a laborious, 
heart-breaking pathway of up-struggle, to reach 
which has necessitated the elimination of all useless, 
dead-load, enslaving habits and superfluous ac- 
coutrements. 

Resistance makes the man. Ignatius well said, 
"It is the part of a good athlete to be flayed with 
pounding and yet to conquer." Our young men 
should be taught that life will only give them in 
reaction what they put into it. Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne, disgusted with the "slackers," the indolent, 
scheming parasites and the stupidly content, said, 
"It is my creed that a man has no claim upon his 
fellow-creatures beyond bread and water and a 
grave, unless he can win it by his strength or skill." 
Without the overcoming of resistance, there could 
be no manhood ; by the properties of resistance, na- 
ture's laws become operative and forces are bal- 
anced, thus making existence possible. Withdraw 
all the resistance in life and we remove character, 
mentahty and Godhood from man. Man was 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 209 

created, not to exist as a universal nonentity, but to 
struggle to achieve, to overcome resistance, wrest 
secrets from Mother Nature and hft the world, by- 
means of his God-like mind and courage, nearer 
the Cosmic Ideal. 

Kant has said that inasmuch as a dove in flight 
has only one obstacle to overcome, and that the 
resistance of the air, one might suppose that if the 
air could be removed out of its way, the bird could 
fly with greater rapidity and ease. But if the air 
were withdrawn, and the bird should attempt to fly 
in a vacuum, it would fall instantly, unable to fly 
at all. The very element that offers the opposition 
to flying is at the same time the condition that makes 
flight possible. That which resists the onward and 
upward journey of man, makes the man; his char- 
acter grows and develops in the reaction, his power 
is intensified in order to overcome ; and as he strug- 
gles to triumph over the resistances of life, he be- 
comes more God-like, for God is Supreme Courage 
as well as Supreme Mind. 

The world needs men of high voltage, who can 
fittingly carry Cosmic Power; brave men, who 
"count it death to falter, not to die;" knowing men 
who at times can see in defeat a far greater triumph 
than a staged world-victory could offer, and who 
know that it oft-times requires more courage and 
strength to decide on what to do than is required 
in the mere doing of it. 

Our schools should seek to develop ambitious, 
earnest youths, fired with energy and purpose, who, 
when placed on the race-course of life, show their 
breeding and training. The world is weary of 



210 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

young egoists, of self-satisfied, complacent and un- 
natural ignoramuses, academically wise, but de- 
plorably foolish. Calm and self-possessed in de- 
bilitating "knowledge," they are the product of a 
perverted educational system and of an apostasy 
of universal Tightness, which confuse civilization, 
luxury and degeneracy with cultivation and world 
progress. Young men should enter the field as 
trained colts, chafing at the bit, stamping the 
ground, eager to enter the race, impatient to get 
away and determined to use their energy to drive 
them to the front when the starting barrier goes 
up. Individual preparedness, individual striving 
and individual achievement carry the world nearer 
to perfection. 

Discouragements and obstructions draw from a 
man that energetic force necessary to promote 
greatness. One learns more from the fight of life 
than from the contentment of life. "Never mind the 
ridicule," wrote Emerson, "never mind the defeat; 
up again, old heart, it seems to say — there is vic- 
tory yet for all justice." The true joy of the soul 
often lies in combat rather than in victory. "What 
will you gain," said Seneca, "if you do your duty 
bravely and generously? You wiU gain the doing 
of it — the deed itself is the gain." The only way 
to attain one's ideals is to endlessly struggle to 
realize them. Anything worth while can only be 
achieved by effort, by struggling with difficulties 
persistently and intelligently. 

Many a world leader would have remained in 
obscurity had he not been goaded into a fighting 
spirit by necessity and resistance. "What do you 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 211 

think," says Epictetus, "that Hercules would have 
been if there had not been such a lion, and hydra, 
and stag, and boar, and certain unjust and bestial 
men whom Hercules used to drive away and clean 
out? And what would he have been if there had been 
nothing of the kind? Is it not plain that he would 
have wrapped himself up and slept? In the first 
place, then, he would not have been a Hercules 
when he was dreaming away his life in such luxury 
and ease ; and, even if he had been one, what would 
have been the use of him, and what the use of his 
arms, and of the strength of the other parts of his 
body, and of his endurance and noble spirit if such 
circumstances and occasions had not roused and 
exercised him ?" 

Poverty has been at times a great stimulus to 
activity and such activity has often led to concen- 
trated, intelhgent effort and been crowned by genius. 
A stimulus of some sort is necessary if one is to 
achieve anything worth while. There must be felt 
the great need, — the need for oneself, or the 
need for humanity. If a boy is born in poverty, 
he may be favored by the gods in this gift of neces- 
sity for work, in order to honorably live. If a boy 
is born of wealthy parents, his soul must be strong 
and true if he is to be individually successful, for 
his stimulus must come from a desire to be of ser- 
vice to others; he must battle for the pure love of 
achievement and not to keep his head above the 
materialistic waters of physical needs. Great men 
have occasionally been born in the palace and the 
mansion and have been great even though nur- 
tured in the lap of luxury, but by far the greater 



212 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

percentage and an overwhelming proportion of the 
great men of the ages, who have left an ineffaceable 
imprint on the world, were born in the hut and the 
cottage and have experienced in full measure the 
dregs, oppression and resistance of the up-struggle 
of life. 

Goethe has said that "it is not a matter of in- 
difference by which door we enter hfe." This is 
true, but the door referred to is not that of the hut 
or the palace, but rather of ancestral worthiness, 
i. e., character, bodily and mental vigor and purity. 
Wealth, social caste, external and ghttering super- 
ficialities of nothingness are essentially unreal. A 
man's inheritance is his endowed mind and heart, 
his individualism, personahty, his sympathetic 
Teachableness and his social nature, together with 
his physical self, either strong and virile, through 
ancestral virtue and conformity with nature's laws, 
or else weak and faltering through hereditary short- 
comings and violations — deliberate or through 
ignorance — of these same uncompromising Univer- 
sal Laws. 

The struggles of men and women to live, to sur- 
vive and bring up their progeny, have produced 
splendid, wholesome, well exercised and healthy 
physical bodies, with substantial, strong nervous 
systems, and, therefore, splendid brains, ready for 
world service and awaiting only the touch of a 
master hand to bring forth mentality whose very 
vigor and freedom will astound the world. On the 
other hand, the easy, placid existence of an aristoc- 
racy and the non-activity of moneyed drones, tor- 
mented by ennui, result in either physical inac- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 213 

tivity, which atrophies, or physical degeneration 
through dissipation; the nervous force is ruined by 
indolence, forced excitement, vicious indulgence or 
listless weariness. The offspring of such unnatural 
parents are nervously sub-normal, and no brain 
created with diseased nerve tissue can be truly great, 
any more than a deformed, weak and sickly body 
could vie with an Apollo at Olympic Games, which 
call forth supreme physical strength, endurance 
and skill. 

Our existence on this planet is no lottery, where 
success or failure depends upon a chance ticket and 
where Fate decrees whether we shall win or lose a 
prize. "Success," declared Choate, "cannot be ac- 
cidental. You might as well let drop a Greek 
alphabet and expect to pick up the Iliad." For- 
tuitous birth gives individuahstic advantages, ac- 
companied, however, by compensating disadvan- 
tages ; it also results in the diversity in quality and 
extent of one's inherent capabilities, but this is for 
the good of humanity and in order that the world's 
work may be acceptably performed by those well 
fitted by nature to do it. 

Through diversity of talents and aptitudes alone 
can mankind continue its upward march. Oppor- 
tunity to express in fulness one's peculiar inherent 
forces comes sooner or later to all who work and 
aspire. To be thrown upon one's own resources is, 
as Franklin said, "to be cast into the very lap of 
fortune; for our faculties then undergo a develop- 
ment and display an energy of which they were 
previously unsusceptible." If it were impossible 
for a man to achieve success or to experience the 



214 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

bitterness of failure, to rise or to fall, then all in- 
dustry would be disheartened, emulation would 
cease, progress would be unknown and the world 
would sleep until individualism, with its opportuni- 
ties and its corresponding responsibilities, was re- 
stored to mankind. 

The goal of mental effort is the uplift into full 
consciousness of all one's innate powers, with the 
control and complete utilization of these forces by 
the individual will. Man grows from within. The 
advantages derived from so-called opportunity or 
a favoring environment are uncertain and preca- 
rious, but the benefits obtained from whole-hearted, 
individual efforts are efficacious and lasting. To 
succeed, one must resolutely make up one's mind to 
accept a life of work and reject a life of indolence. 
When Dionysius the Elder was asked whether he 
was at leisure, he feehngly replied, "God forbid 
that it should ever befall me." 

Life is a serious business and nothing worth while, 
lasting and satisfying will come to any of us except 
through hard, indefatigable work persistently ex- 
pressed through the days and years. 

We do not truly possess anything which we have 
not earned by the expenditure of effort. "The gods 
sell us all good things for hard work." Spinoza 
said, "All noble things are as difficult as they are 
rare," and Griggs has aptly added, "They are rare 
because they are difficult." There is no royal road 
on earth to anything worth while. To gain knowl- 
edge of the world and to subjugate nature and 
use her forces for the good of humanity, the king 
and the serf must conform to the same Cosmic rules. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 215 

The road to knowledge and achievement is the road 
of intelligent human effort and persistent hard work 
and it has been well said that it is a "highway with 
no toll-gate upon it." Euclid, we are told, was re- 
quested by Ptolemy, King of Egypt, to teach him 
his wonderful new science of geometry. Euclid 
began with the necessary definitions, axioms and 
propositions, but was soon impatiently halted by the 
restless and indignant King, who, with effrontery 
and the annoyance of an offended kingly egoism,, 
asked, "Must a Pharaoh learn like a common 
slave?" Euclid, with that rare dignity and wisdom 
of the truly great, rephed, "There is no Royal Road 
to geometry." No man inherits knowledge; he 
must gain it by effort. No man at birth is endowed 
with character; he must win it in his fight with the 
world. 

The State of Kansas has a splendid motto which 
is inspiring to the true worker: "Through diffi- 
culty to the stars." Madison Peters tells us of an 
ancient crest, with the symbol of a pickax, and the 
appropriate words, "Either I will find a way or 
make one." The world calls for men who are re- 
solved as individuals to give their lives a meaning 
and who are brave enough to stand firm in their 
convictions, vote with the minority, and dare to be 
out of fashion with political and social crowd opin- 
ions. 

"The iron will of one stout heart shall make a thousand quail, 
A feeble dwarf dauntlessly resolved will turn the tide of 

battle 
And rally, to a nobler strife, the giants that had fled." 

The real poverty of life is not always to be found 



216 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

in the slums and huts of the so-called poor, but it is 
often far more prevalent in the luxurious homes of 
the worldly rich. They who have no vision, no 
faith, no imagination, no infinite hopes, no glad- 
some good- will surging through their hearts, no true 
feelings of humanity and no contact with the 
Cosmic Spirit of life are the destitute and the poor 
of this world. To such, the inspired touch of true 
genius never stoops, no matter how hard they may 
work, concentrate their mental forces and struggle 
for success. Worldly success may and should in a 
measure accompany true success and lasting 
achievement in the interests of mankind and uni- 
versal progress, but what is often branded as world- 
ly success is but a soulless icy pinnacle of selfish 
avarice — anti-human — the consummation of a life 
of error. 

Life must be met in a fighting spirit. Human 
excellence, be it mental or moral, is seldom made 
easy of attainment, but we may achieve much, if 
we will only pay for it with its equivalent in whole- 
some, persistent ejffort. Non-resistance means 
mediocrity. Struggles to survive, to overcome ob- 
stacles and attain, develop character and that men- 
tal poise and tone of soul demanded by the true 
spirit of life. Wordsworth well depicts as a happy 
warrior the character of the successful world's 
worker, gifted with enthusiasm, poise, self-knowl- 
edge and well exercised faculties of reason : 

*'It is the generous spirit, who, when brought 
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought 
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought; 
Whose high endeavors are an inward light 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 217 

That makes the path before him always bright — 
Who, with a natural instinct to discern 
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; 
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there 
But makes his moral being his prime care. 

* * * 

He labors good on good to fix, and owes 
To virtue every triumph that he knows; 
Who if he rise to station of command 
Rises by open means; and there will stand 
On honorable terms, or else retire. 
And in himself possess his own desire ; 
Who comprehends his trust, and to the same 
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim; 

* * * 

Who, not content that former worth stand fast. 
Looks forward, persevering to the last. 
From well to better, daily self-surpast." 



XII 

THE era in which we live has been called the 
Machine Age; it has also been described as 
the Age of Human Speciahzation. That 
phase of the Machine Age in which men have been 
enslaved to mechanism, as the tools of a money- 
grabbing and wealth-worshipping class, is rapidly- 
passing; but the age of the machine is progressing 
and expanding. Workers are being elevated from 
the dead line of automatic mental function and 
stagnant brains, to duties of a more human kind, 
where the workers operate the machines — not ma- 
chines the workers — and where vocational functions, 
with mind activity, are brought into play. 

Machines dominated, tended, nursed and driven 
by workers are like horses ridden by jockeys, 
where human skill plays an important part in the 
race to the goal; but machines which dominate 
toilers are juggernauts which ride mercilessly over 
brutalized unfortunates and, with monotonous grind, 
make for drudgery which robs man of all initiative, 
interest and hope. The record of the first part of 
the Machine Age in Great Britain, and in many 
sections of our own land, is one of horror and per- 
sistent crimes against humanity. Machines were 
monsters, tended by human slaves and it is only in 
comparatively recent years that the worker has be- 
come master of the machine and obtained his free- 
dom. 219 



220 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Craftsmen have existed since the days when men 
of peculiar abihty were deputized to do special 
work for the good of the tribe, such as the making 
of arrows, plows, utensils and the forging of swords. 
During the ages, the agricultural and fighting 
forces have predominated, the former to sustain life 
by obtaining food, the latter to defend the tribe or 
nation and its property, and for offensive extension 
as its military power developed. The stronger 
warriors became rulers, while the men of more men- 
tality capitalized their learning and imagination, 
preyed upon their fellows and, by intimidating 
brawn by brain, became priests, soothsayers, oracles, 
physicians and prophets. The artisan was con- 
sidered of little importance, and the merchant did 
not stand very high in the social scale. 

The last few centuries have seen a mad scramble 
for recognition by commercial and dominating in- 
dustrial interests. Through the power of machines 
and gold, priests, nobility and kings have been 
tumbled from their high places, armies have been 
controlled, countries subjugated, dynasties over- 
thrown or subsidized; and today industrialism and 
commercialism are enthroned Molochs, demanding 
worship and, at times, human sacrifice. Our modern 
civilization rests upon wealth, for wealth is the busi- 
ness of the world. 

When war consumed all that man captured or 
made, nothing permanent could be built and there 
was no reserve to draw upon. Specialization was 
the first offshoot of individualism and as it became 
profitable for the tribes to have men apply them- 
selves to specific work, it gradually became profit- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 221 

able for the individual. Commodities of value to 
others were made by men and women of talent ; ex- 
change and barter were originated and later, money- 
sprang into existence as a basis of exchange. 

Adam Smith has said that the wealth of a nation 
is the creation of labor and labor is the measure of 
the exchangeable value of commodities. This was 
true in prehistoric times but is not true today, for 
the greatest increase of any single department in 
wealth has arisen from increased value of land; the 
increase of population and location of industries 
raise land values, as do also minerals, timber, geo- 
graphical, topographical, or climatic advantages, 
which respond to the demands required by new in- 
ventions. Nevertheless, individualism, with the use 
and development of peculiar talents, has made pos- 
sible the useful, mechanical and industrial arts and 
later, the fine arts and liberal arts — the doing of 
some one thing well. 

Machines and inventions battled for a time with 
art and, as the latter seemed defeated, all that is 
soulless, sordid, avaricious and mean in life was 
apparently victorious. Marx predicted that the 
machine would extend the hours of labor, which 
were already as much as human endurance could 
stand, and depress wages, which were then but a 
mere pittance, whereas the reverse has come to pass 
through evolution — the Industrial Revolution and 
the Machine Age. 

Art is triumphing over the machine as mechanism 
is becoming subordinate to the human mind. The 
capacity of the world to do work has increased 
tremendously by the use of the machine, but the art 



222 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

of living has required that the machine be made the 
serf and man the master. In their infancy, ma- 
chines were broken by frenzied mobs; and much 
mechanism devised by individualistic human minds 
was believed to be conceived by devils. The won- 
ders of mental achievement were veiled in mysticism 
and magic, when they were not denounced by an 
infuriated populace, oppressed and driven by igno- 
rance to rebellion against changes and progress. 

The Machine Age took much of the poetry out 
of life, but the industrial era, with its printing press, 
telegraphs, railroads, steamships, factories and 
great human conveniences, has taken the world 
from a few and given it to many and has multiplied 
opportunities for worth-while service to an extent 
that a century ago was undreamed of and two cen- 
turies ago would have been considered absolutely 
impossible. 

The Machine Age brought with it improved 
facilities for education, and as education increased, 
even if it was deplorably dogmatized and censored, 
freedom became more generally possible. The ex- 
ploiter of labor in the early industrial era cared 
nothing for labor except to demand long hours and 
low pay, just as Kings and Barons have cared 
naught for their soldiers' lives and the well-being of 
the "common herd." The printing press, a mere 
machine of the Machine Age, has sounded the 
death-knell of oppression, whether autocratic, eccle- 
siastical, educational, political, or industrial ; and the 
speed of transit of men and messages has been an 
important factor in determining the rapidity in the 
attainment of liberty. The warfare of humanity 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 223 

against "divine right" potentates, self -usurped au- 
thorities, spiritual and temporal powers, is still be- 
ing fought, and the battle will continue until the 
masses become individual, reasoning, thinking en- 
tities; until they scorn to be dominated by tradi- 
tions, external authorities and the manipulators or 
exploiters of any kind of machines, no matter what 
their nature or sphere of activity may be. 

Man was created to be free, an individual, a util- 
izer of the forces of nature, an inventor, user and 
dominator of mechanical apparati, an organizer or 
member of a group of individual men, working in 
concert, with machine-like precision. We have jour- 
neyed beyond the Machine Age, with its material- 
ism, its worship of Mammon, its greed, oppression 
and serfdom, and we are now emerging through the 
age of the machine to what will ultimately be an era 
of true liberty. 

Just as the "Sabbath was made for man and not 
man for the Sabbath," so the machine, society, state, 
Constitution, church and Bible were made for man, 
and not man for them. Diderot cried out in France 
to the church of his day, which was stifling truth 
and binding it fast with fetters, "Release your 
God," and the cry of our age is, — Release your false 
gods — your dogmatic behefs, temporal, spiritual, 
political, social, industrial, commercial and educa- 
tional. Worship truth, exercise reason, be individ- 
ual; follow that which is within yourself, the true 
inner man, and banish externals, with their false- 
ness, artificiality, mental passiveness and spiritual 
blindness, to the hell from which they sprang. 

Specialization of individualistic effort has alone 



224 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

advanced the world nearer to the Cosmic Goal of 
perfection ; but specialization often means persistent 
effort and periods of intense concentration, rather 
than the use of one faculty to the detriment and 
resultant atrophy of others. William James has 
said that the total mental efficiency of a man is the 
resultant of all his faculties. "He is too complex a 
being for any one of them to have the casting vote. 
If any one of them does have the casting vote, it is 
more likely to be the strength of his desire and pas- 
sion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is 
proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning pow- 
er, inventiveness, excellence of the senses — all are 
subsidiary to this. No matter how scatter-brained 
the type of a man's successive fields of consciousness 
may be, if he really cares for a subject, he will re- 
turn to it incessantly from his mental wanderings 
and, first and last, do more with it and get more 
results from it, than another person whose attention 
may be more continuous during a given interval, 
but whose passion for the subject is of a more lan- 
guid and less permanent sort." 

Specialization, to be effective, presupposes peri- 
ods of deep concentration, such as breed mental 
initiative, originality and invention and are pursued 
with keen enthusiasm and absorbing interest. Great 
inventions are always the product of minds which 
are capable of earnest, well- focused effort, energized 
by a passion to master and achieve ; but these minds 
do not necessarily specialize to the extent that they 
play persistently on one string. Such speciaHzation 
leads to mental degeneracy, over-developed local- 
ism and atrophied areas of great innate power. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 225 

The brainy man, the world leader, the great indi- 
vidualistic mental force in the world, is he who has 
the power of a specialist in many of the multitudi- 
nous avenues of thought and has developed, to a 
relatively high degree of intelligence, whatever in- 
herent faculties were bequeathed to him at birth. 
Every faculty exercised strengthens in some meas- 
ure other faculties of the same mind. The story of 
genius is, to some extent, the story of work and per- 
sistent industry, expressed courageously in the face 
of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. George 
Eliot laughed at the idea of writing by inspiration 
and a famous educator once remarked that genius is 
but the glorious output of a mind that had learned 
how to make effort effectively, free from restraint 
of any kind — in harmony with Infinite Truth. 

The great inventions of the world have not been 
made by men who isolated themselves from their 
fellows and for months and years worked unceas- 
ingly to solve a great problem. As a rule, such pro- 
cedure would be an effective way not to solve a 
problem, notwithstanding the admirable qualities 
exhibited, such as concentration, determination, ap- 
preciation of importance and self-sacrifice. All 
virtues must be controlled and life must be natural, 
or else harm becomes the inevitable reaction of the 
abuse of that which, within the limits of reason and 
the confines of "the mean," is good. 

It has been said that the world advances on two 
legs — "Invention" and "Imitation;" the former is 
generally admitted, the latter questioned. Inven- 
tion must build upon something and the structure 
upon which it raises its superstructure is the knowl- 



226 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

edge and practice of the past. To be prepared to 
truly invent, one must be capable of first imitating 
the good work of one's predecessors and contempo- 
raries. Winwood Reade has said, "Paradoxical as 
it may appear, it is only the imitative mind that can 
attain originahty; the artist must learn to copy be- 
fore he can create." The true originator strives to 
attain complete historical and coeval knowledge 
concerning any problem in which he has become in- 
terested and endeavors to learn all there is to know 
about the matter, before he feels competent to freely 
utilize his inventive powers in an effort to improve 
upon what the world has already achieved in that 
pecuhar line of accomplishment. 

Some "inventors" work intuitively, but they never 
know where their work stands in the field of original 
production — whether they have produced anything 
new or not. They do not know the prior, or even 
the present state of the art ; indeed, the world is full 
of long-haired, eccentric, self-satisfied inventors who 
produce today something which, in their ignorance, 
they honestly beheve to be original, but which has 
been known, used and probably abandoned many 
years, decades, or even centuries before. Intuition 
is an invaluable power when harnessed for work with 
common sense, education, research and industry. 
Genius may be, to a great degree, intuitive, but the 
more strings upon which it can play its message to 
the world, the greater will be its power and Cosmic 
usefulness. Hence study and work to acquire 
knowledge, with the exercise of the imitative in- 
stinct, are absolutely necessary as a grounding be- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 227 

fore the initiative and originating mind can do itself 
justice and perform real work with power. 

A genius is not a freak, but rather a well edu- 
cated and well rounded, knowing man; one who 
profits by the mental victories as well as the defects 
of his fellows and of preceding generations and 
ages. Most of the world's greatest artists, as well 
as inventors, have been, first of all, good imitators. 
Mozart began his musical career by imitating Bach ; 
Beethoven by copying Mozart. Moliere mimicked 
the Greek dramatists before he learned, as a dis- 
tinctive personality, to draw from the world about 
him. It has been well said that the many-sided char- 
acter of Goethe's mind, which made him a marvel 
among men, was based primarily upon his imitative 
instincts ; he has been likened to a chameleon, taking 
the hue of the ground on which he fed ; but, with his 
rare genius, he elaborated and glorified all that he 
touched. 

Emulation is, in fact, but a noble form of imita- 
tion. The greatest painters, sculptors, architects, 
engineers, chemists, scientists and philosophers of 
the Renaissance and modern times have imitated 
first and then later struggled to improve, clarify 
and perfect. Most of these immortal men have 
served a sort of apprenticeship with the greatest of 
the older masters, before venturing to carry the staff 
of progress a little nearer the Cosmic Goal. 

One of the great modern nations is a wonderful 
imitator and has risen to tremendous power; being 
young in years, measured from the time of the aboli- 
tion of the Feudal System, its citizens have not as 
yet reached the inventive stage of progress, but by a 



228 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

perfected system of imitation, the nation is already- 
great in achievement. Another modern power 
makes claim to wonderful epoch-making inventions 
that are, in reality, the result of imitation plus in- 
dustry and research ; the results achieved cannot be 
considered the fruits of genius or mental originality. 
The knowledge of the world is absorbed by this 
people, the avenues of possible further accomplish- 
ment defined; and research work is industriously 
and almost blindly performed by unscientific meth- 
ods, so that, by sheer persistency and power of will, 
some new formulas and processes are bound to be 
discovered. 

There are men who build for themselves reputa- 
tions as inventors and geniuses of wonderful origin- 
ality, who probably never had a clean-cut, absolutely 
original, world-moving thought in their heads, and 
whose entire power in the world has been due to imi- 
tation and blundering, rather than to intelligent 
research. Real inventors are broad-gauged men, 
with the rare gift of conmion sense ; today, as in the 
past, nothing astonishes mankind so much as com- 
mon sense, real, hard, individualistic thinking and 
plain deahng. The greatest inventors of the indus- 
trial era have all claimed that their accomplishments 
were merely due to hard and persistent effort 
coupled with common sense, which might be more 
truly called "uncommon" sense. To produce com- 
mon sense, a man's brain and mentality will have to 
be unshackled from lethargy and harnessed to will- 
power. The world, however, is so mentally enslaved 
and somnolent that the proper use of a human mind, 
which ordinarily should be classified as "common 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 229 

sense," has to be hailed today as something kindred 
to revelation and we call it genius — a divine power 
exhibited by man. This same power, in a greater or 
lesser degree, is waiting to utilize, for universal gain, 
every human brain. 

Yoritomo said, "Common sense is a central sense 
toward which all impressions converge and unite in 
one sentiment — the desire for truth." If any man 
desires the truth hard enough, he will seek for it ; and 
seeking with unwavering purpose and persistency, 
he will find it. What is a genius other than one who 
brings immutable truth to mankind; truth which 
can be used in some form or other to hft the world 
nearer to the great Universal Ideal? 

The real successes of the human mind follow 
obedience to the laws of nature, which demand the 
education, growth and development of the mind in 
totality as well as in relation to certain peculiar fac- 
ulties. Our American newspapers and magazines 
are fuU of stories of "successful" Americans who 
have devoted their lives to one thing. That one 
thing J lauded as meritorious, is found, upon analysis, 
to be one of the many ways of making money ; the 
"successful" man, when weighed in the scales of true 
success, is nothing but an abnormality, with acquisi- 
tiveness and possibly combativeness, wonderfully 
developed, while the idealistic and finer, humane, 
reverent and spiritual parts of his brain are hard- 
ened and dead. "What does it matter though a man 
gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Spe- 
cialization in the business fields of life, with success 
measured by gold, hardens the human heart, stifles 
sympathy, kills brotherhood, enthrones the ego and 



230 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

makes a man into a lifeless machine — a mere cash 
register. All-round development of mental and 
spiritual faculties is his only salvation. 

We hear of men so engrossed in their business 
that they work fifteen and eighteen hours per day; 
these men can be divided into three classes : 

(1) Those who have the avarice for wealth or 
who have stifled everything truly noble within them 
and who, having no background and no real sub- 
stance to their lives, have to fill the vacuity of their 
minds with a continuous grind, or else be miserable, 
lonesome, nervously perplexed and discontented, 
until they find some way to "kill time" or return to 
work. 

(2) Men who lose their balance temporarily and 
honestly strive to achieve success by abusing nature, 
to their detriment. Efficiency of mental effort de- 
creases when certain brain sections are not given 
time to recuperate and take on renewed vigor by 
rest. Gray matter needs occasional and regular 
periods for rest, re-creation and rebuilding, just as 
the muscles of the body demand rest and the whole 
body needs sleep. 

The story of a modern inventor working eighteen 
or twenty hours a day, makes good advertising, but 
can scarcely be credited. He may fuss and potter 
and be too nervous to sleep; but real productive 
brain work could not be pursued for any such period 
of time — it would be inhuman and impossible. The 
"eighteen or twenty hours a day" sounds suspici- 
ously like the work of a good press agent. 

The modern inventor, with a large corps of well 
organized assistants, must accomplish much. Many 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 231 

problems have been solved by prolific "trial and 
error" experiments; by work of crews, rather than 
by the inventor's own initiative; by weight of re- 
search facilities and expenditures of time and 
money, rather than by inventiveness. 

The truly great achievements of science, consid- 
ered from a meritorious standpoint, are not those 
where thousands of experiments are made on a 
tremendous scale, in the blind hope of solving a 
problem, but where an idea in a human mind is 
developed theoretically, by persistent reasoning and 
thought, until nature's barriers are overcome. In 
the search for a new process, one type of inventor 
says, "Such and such a chemical, in combination 
with certain matter, treated in a certain way, will 
produce the required results ;" he uses the scientific 
knowledge of the past and intelligently adds to it; 
he is an individualist, an originator — a pusher of 
the world toward Cosmic Perfection. Another type 
of inventor says, "Buy every chemical costing under, 
say, one dollar per pound and try them in combina- 
tion and treat such combinations with all available 
matter fulfilling a certain specification and see what 
you can get — possibly one or more will give us the 
results desired." This is not the procedure of a true 
scientist — ^^in fact, the only quality which keeps him 
in the field is his financial ability to maintain a Re- 
search Laboratory and an occasional streak of luck 
in stumbling on a process which will bring glory to 
his name and ducats to his pocket. 

(3) There is a third class of men, known as hard 
workers, who have a vocation in life, usually ardu- 
ous and exacting, and yet, in their margin of time, 



232 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

have avocations and enjoy most diversified interests, 
useful to themselves and the world. Men of this 
class are mentally balanced and poised, with wide 
human sympathies ; they are philosophic and imagi- 
native and, being individualistic and reasoning be- 
ings, are almost invariably spiritually minded and 
opposed to all dogmatism and the worship of sense- 
less conventions and the externals of life. Such men 
in their avocations have done epoch-making work in 
the world and today they are the real leaven of 
society. 

How true is the saying that the world is a thing 
that man must learn to despise and even neglect 
before he can work in it and for it ; as Carlyle says, 
"Every noble crown is, and on earth ever vidll be, a 
crown of thorns." The great advance that the world 
has made has been principally due to busy, prac- 
tical men who have been obliged to work hard, but 
in the working have kept their minds active and 
their souls alive and in whose scanty leisure, great 
ideas have been born and developed to usefulness. 

Think of the great men of the past century who 
have risen from obscurity amid the jeers and scoffs 
of the world and bequeathed to a sneering humanity, 
startling inventions and ideas that have revolution- 
ized living. The individualistic imagination is the 
father of all the really great discoveries and inven- 
tions ; and no man can be great who has not a culti- 
vated imagination. Work in the world with one's 
fellows, steady and persistent contact with the prac- 
tical problems of life, develop the great man, deepen 
his sympathies, teach relative values, together with 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 233 

the essence of the humanities, the horrors of mental 
serfdom and the preeminence of soul. 

"I go forth among men, armored in a pure intent^ 
Great work is to be done, and whether I stand or crownless 

fall. 
It matters not, so God's work be done. ( 

For I have learned to prize the lightning's deed 
Nor heed the thmider following after which men call fame." 

The great man struggling in the world perceives 
the need of culture and service. He feels the surg- 
ing passion of humanity and his hand touches the 
beating pulse of real life. He is of the world and 
no power that affects mankind, whether dogmas 
that enslave, or chains that enfetter, can be mean- 
ingless or unimportant to him. Yet he is not of the 
world, for his deep spirituality and individuahstic 
imagination will save him from sordid materialism. 

Life is a growth process. It is dynamic, not static ; 
for while man hves, he grows, and in the growth 
itself is life. Plato said, "Nothing ever is, but is 
always becoming." If life should become statical 
and settle into bhnd routine, the result would be 
death. Apparent equilibrium of hfe can only be 
attained by motion ; if we lose this equilibrium, then, 
as Grigg says, will "result a destructive riot of dis- 
ordered forces." We cannot have life and inac- 
tivity. Our world of motion can never degenerate 
to mere chaos or a Sahara of dead routine. We 
must progress, grow, develop and move upward and 
onward according to Universal Law. The aim of 
life is the art of life; it must be lived well. The 
problem of life is man's attitude toward the world 



234 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

and it demands the full and complete use of all his 
faculties — his mental and physical equipment. 

"When I was born 
From all the seas of strength 
Fate filled a chalice 
Saying, This be thy portion, child." 

It is man's duty and mission to take the portion 
allotted by the gods, utilize it and develop it to its 
fulness and, in so doing, to Hve. A worth-while 
life must be a useful life, and man perfects himself 
by working. An English clergyman much im- 
pressed Paul Dubois when, after several weeks of 
companionship, in which he had heard neither 
preaching nor moralizing, the Minister earnestly 
said in parting, "Remember there are two duties to 
be fulfilled in this world ; the first is to give to your 
personahty all the worth it is capable of possessing ; 
and the second is to put it at the service of others." 

Pascal has said that a man's usefulness in the 
world is marred by his idleness, his passions, his 
pride and self-love, which really mean his egoism 
and laziness ; but this is true only of those who know 
not, though they pretend to know and who are frail, 
though boastful of strength. 

There are also those men in the world whose great 
inherent power lies dormant through lack of con- 
fidence in themselves, the world and their God. 
They hang in space away from the solid earth and 
are fearful of being cut adrift lest failure disgrace 
them. They remind one of Don Quixote, hanging 
by his wrist from the stable window and imagining 
himself over a terrible abyss ; yet, when Maritornes 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 235 

cut him down, he discovered that he had been all the 
time only a few inches above the solid ground. 

Every positive power with which a man is en- 
dowed was given to him to use, and only a moral 
coward will avoid contact and battle with realities 
by continuing to delay his entry into the fight; a 
protracted delay means a steadily increasing lack of 
desire and, ultimately, a condition of passive indiffer- 
ence. There are men who build castles in the air, 
dream of what they will do, yet let opportunities for 
accomplishment pass them by, because of lack of 
confidence or power to overcome inertia, or, per- 
haps, a preference for imagination, rather than 
actual work and achievement. Thoreau said in sub- 
stance to such: "ReaUze your dream and put the 
foundations to solid earth under your castles of the 
air." The world calls for workers, not dreamers. 
We must strive not to see what lies dimly in the dis- 
tance, to the exclusion of what lies clearly at hand. 

The true worker has imagination, an ideal, a 
vision, a hope ; and he strives to realize his ideal by 
energetic and enthusiastic effort, which is work. 
Real work is creative work in some form or other, 
and creative work is self -fulfilment. To accomplish 
that which is at hand helps us to realize opportuni- 
ties further afield. Emerson said, "Hitch your 
wagon to a star," and a wagon is a rather substan- 
tial and not by any means ethereal conveyance. 
Emerson appreciated the existence of the wagon 
and the need of the star. The hand can never exe- 
cute anything higher than the spirit can see and the 
personahty aspire to. 

The reward of work well done is in the ideal be- 



236 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

coming real and the imaginative dream an accom- 
plished definite fact; the creative must necessarily 
always follow the discerning intellect. There is a 
great difference between a day dream and a pur- 
pose; the former is passive, the latter active. The 
dreamer is content ; the planner, hungry for attain- 
ment. When we dream, hope, or wish, we are apt 
to wait for the desired thing to come to us ; when we 
purpose, we perform the task necessary to realize 
the desired end. The doing of a thing means the 
overcoming of all resistance in its environment, the 
overthrow of all passiveness and the mastery of all 
negative forces within oneself. Doing a thing causes 
power to flow in reaction to the doer, thus permit- 
ting the mobilization of greater power for future 
effort. 

Every mind, to be great, must have a great plan 
and noble purpose, but great minds must have vision 
and conviction, energized into performance. Great- 
ness comes with accomplishment and not with aspir- 
ations alone. It is far better, however, to be a doer 
and earnest worker on a small scale in a field of 
useful service, than a dreamer of vast schemes, 
handicapped by indolent faculties for realizing the 
dreams. In one of Thoreau's manuscripts we read, 
"The youth gets together his materials to build a 
bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple 
on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man 
(with much of his life wasted) concludes to build a 
woodshed with them." Emerson aptly added, "Bet- 
ter honest woodsheds than nothing but impossible 
dreams." 



XIII 

VERSATILITY, in its modern rather than 
literal sense, means to be capable of turning 
with ease from one subject to another. This 
admirable quality does not indicate so much a lack 
of speciahzation in one line as a mental equipment 
of many pronounced characteristics and faculties, 
each of which can be so developed as to compete 
with specialized mental attributes in other people. 
One man, spending an hour a day with concentrated, 
intelligent thought on a certain subject, may become 
more of an authority on that subject after one year 
than another man who makes it the basis of his voca- 
tion and has worked on the matter ten hours a day 
for ten years. Intelligence, concentration, thor- 
oughness and individuality of thought, together with 
reasoning and reflective powers, draw the lines of 
demarcation between the mentally wise and the 
mentally foolish. 

The speciahst, with but one thought in life, is only 
partially cultured; he has restricted vision and an 
inhuman and boresome personality. He is mentally 
lopsided, unnatural and unendurable. The brain is 
not like a Wernicke book-case, with each book read 
or lesson taught making an added section. Unless 
the book read has stimulated thought and been a 
mental tonic, whipping one's mind into positive indi- 
vidualistic thought, it has added nothing to one's 

237 



238 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

mind and possibly nothing to one's brain, other than 
a few memorized but unaccepted and undigested 
words. Unless a lesson taught has opened up new 
avenues in the brain, new visions to inspire, and sug- 
gested new fields to conquer and the necessary 
equipment for worth-while exploration, the lesson 
has been merely a waste of time, rebelliously sub- 
mitted to or idly gratifying. 

Great minds have many interests ; they are many 
selves in one self. Hippias, the Greek Sophist of 
the fifth century B. C, was a famous master of 
rhetoric, eloquent and learned, and ready to answer 
any man's questions on astronomy, geometry, math- 
ematics, language, music, genealogic antiquities 
and philosophy. He was a man of great versatility, 
and even made with his own hands all his clothes 
and shoes. He wrote some excellent works on 
Homer and was a collector of Greek and foreign 
literature and archaeological treatises. Pythagoras 
was a traveler, mathematician, astronomer, teacher 
and organizer. Melissus, of Samos, was a philoso- 
pher, a most clever politician, an executive and a 
brave general. To Flavins Arrianus, the eminent 
Stoic philosopher, we owe much ; he was a wise ad- 
ministrator and successful general. He was also a 
lecturer and held high public offices under Hadrian. 
In 130 A. D. he received the consulship, later filled 
a priesthood and still later we find him devoting 
himself to the production of works on history and 
military tactics. In the midst of his strenuous ca- 
reer, this eminently worthy and versatile genius 
wrote and pubHshed the discourses of his teacher 
Epictetus. 



1 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 239 

Some little time ago, a modern writer, attempting 
to prove by history the old saying, "Jack of all 
trades, master of none," had the poor judgment to 
write disparagingly of the greatest genius of the 
Renaissance — Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), say- 
ing that had Leonardo Hved today he would have 
been a third or fourth-rate engineer. Versatility does 
not make "Jacks" or "scatter-brains," any more 
than specialization makes "Masters." One man 
with developed brain and well-rounded personahty, 
with vision, ideals and purpose energetically ex- 
pressed, may be a genius in many fields of human 
endeavor, or, at least, worthy of being considered a 
specialist, or an acknowledged authority. To do 
much does not mean to do it badly. To do many 
things does not indicate that any one of them need 
be done badly. The old cry of "Let the shoemaker 
stick to his last" has been overdone; it savors too 
much of protective restriction for decaying, selfish 
interests. 

A Paderewski need not attempt blacksmithing, 
but after all, if a man of Paderewski's temperament 
could do the work of a smith, without detrimentally 
affecting his purely physical self, i. e., fingers, hands, 
arms and shoulders, the mental work of smithing 
would do a Paderewski good; and it is mental and 
not physical work that we are discussing. Leonardo 
could never have done any work like a "Jack." He 
brought back to the mind of the world the wonders 
of science that had slept for many long centuries. He 
was an inheritor and a perfecter, yet in science he 
seemed to be a pioneer, working wholly for the fu- 
ture and, in great part, alone and against tremen- 



240 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

dous odds. This wonderful genius was one of the 
greatest painters of the greatest era of painters that 
the world has ever known. He was also a talented 
sculptor, a skilled architect, a brilliant engineer, as 
well as a noted physician, mechanician and natural 
philosopher. We are told that "no man gifted in 
the same degree was at once for art and science." 

It is doubtful if this age could produce a Leo- 
nardo da Vinci ; appreciation of art has lowered, our 
minds are too sordid and the authority of the usurp- 
ing specialist and dogmatist too complete. This age 
is habitually shamefaced or absent-minded before 
the ideal, i. e., before the real nature of things. This 
is an era of hurry, bustle and motion ; of crowds and 
mass ; of specialists to think out all our thoughts and 
serve conclusions, duly censored and peptonized in 
tabloid form. It is a rushing, trashy age, teeming 
with excitement, thrills and so-called "big" things; 
midget men propping up the universe and hurrahing 
about civilization, with real cultivation ignored and 
undergoing decay. It is an hysterical age of brass 
bands, waving banners and senseless noise ; the wor- 
ship of externals of life, of Mammon, the authority 
of inane dogmatism and an unreal, unspiritual God, 
a burlesque of the religion of Christ and of the real 
soul. Men today are like the sailors of Ulysses and 
mistake bags of wind for bags of treasures. The 
hectic character of imaginative literature and many 
theatrical plays of the day are indicative of the wild 
state of our psychic life, the substitution of ragtime 
for real music, and the sensuous dance for the 
rhythm of wholesome happiness. Anything abnor- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 241 

mal must be feasted upon, notwithstanding that 
such diet blotches and indelibly disfigures life. 

The average man of this age brags about our civ- 
ilization and advancement, speaks contemptuously 
of the ancient Romans and Greeks and ridicules 
the marvelous versatile minds of the Renaissance, 
which, in reality, seemed to reclaim to the world by 
atavism or reversion a wonderful type of mentality 
seldom permitted to grow and manifest itself during 
the mind oppression and mental slavery of the 
greater part of the Christian Era. It has been said 
that if one wants to find a barbarian, or even a 
savage, it is only necessary to scratch the very thin 
veneer which covers the average man nearest you, 
and the remark was famous long before the hideous 
war broke out in civilized. Christianized Europe. Is 
it not time that we paid attention to the admonition 
of Marcus Aurelius, "Cease to be whirled around"? 
Such men are "Triflers who have wearied themselves 
in life by their activity, and yet have no object to 
which to direct their movements and their thought. 
Give thyself time to learn something good." The 
world, we say, has made tremendous progress dur- 
ing the last few decades. Has it been progress, or 
merely an hallucination of speed and sensuous real- 
ization of luxuries, falsely considered as necessities ? 
Have we really progressed, is our civilization cul- 
ture, and have advancing years and decades of mar- 
velous apparent achievement brought peace and 
happiness to this poor world? 

In his mental make-up, Michael Angelo (1475- 
1564) was many-sided. He always averred that 
painting was not his business, yet his art on the walls 



242 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at Rome, tremen- 
dous in area and conception, and brilliant in execu- 
tion, will continue to live through the ages as the 
world's greatest specimens of mural art. Angelo, 
by nature and predilection, turned to sculpture, 
where he did magnificent work, but as an engineer 
he had no superior in his day; much of the noble 
edifice of St. Peter's at Rome is due to his versatile 
and well-developed mind. He was also a bronze 
founder, architect, soldier, philosopher and poet, 
and his work in each of these lines of endeavor was 
most meritorious and worthy of being set as a goal 
to be reached by our specialists of today. Angelo, a 
big man, engaged in big things, an artist by temper- 
ament and always a striving perfectionist, demand- 
ed perfection in detail. Although constantly har- 
assed and living in troublesome times, a sensitive, 
reticent man, amidst most unsympathetic people, he 
worked to do to the very best of his ability every- 
thing which he undertook, for, said he, "Trifles 
make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." 

Angelo and many of his contemporaries, together 
with most of the artists of the two centuries of Ital- 
ian mediaeval glory, worked for future generations ^ 
and time has not yet effaced their living works. 
What a difference between the substantiality of 
mediaeval builders and artists and the superficiality 
and shoddiness of our era of whimsical unrest, hys- 
terical and changing emotionalism, the worship of 
the immediate present and our indifference to the 
future ! Mind cultivation alone will save our coun- 
try from tremendous failure following our period of 
unprecedented prosperity and apparent greatness. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 243 

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was an English phi- 
losopher, scientist, statesman and essayist. This most 
learned litterateur wrote masterpieces and virtually 
ruled England and yet his great work was in the 
reorganization of the sciences and the restoration of 
man to the command over nature. In Bacon we see 
the connoisseur, the creative artist, and the produc- 
tive worker, the laudable three-fold thread of Hfe. 

Philosophy is not the mere science of things, di- 
vine and human; it is the search after truth and is 
the parent of all sciences. Great thinkers and states- 
men, such as Bacon, who reformed modern science, 
share with Descartes the honor of inaugurating 
modern philosophy. The world owes much to Ba- 
con for his stand against the tyranny of authority 
and his arguments against the vagaries of unfettered 
imagination and the academic aims of unpractical 
dialectics. 

Descartes (1596-1650), the great French philos- 
opher, was a man of very feeble health, but with a 
brilliant mind, well cultivated and developed — a 
specialist in many fields. He did meritorious work 
in anatomy, mathematics, optics and many divi- 
sions of science and had a rare appreciation of music 
and nature. Each morning he had to spend in bed 
because of physical weakness; thus he developed a 
habit of reflective thinking. In early youth he dis- 
trusted the authority of tradition and teachers and 
nurtured his mind to grow free and unfettered. 
Descartes and the philosophers of the schools that 
he has done much to found or inspire, never refused 
to submit to laws and government for the good of 
the many and the well-being of the state. 



244 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

Philosophical individuality is a philosophy of 
ethical beauty; it believes in law and order — for is 
not the universe the expression of law? — and it is 
diametrically opposed to anarchy, which is but chaos 
and the absence of law. Descartes rejected mental 
authority and the dogmatism of truth. He em- 
bodied his rules for practical life in four maxims: 
one, to submit himself to the laws in which he was 
brought up; another, to act, on all those occasions 
which called for action, promptly and according to 
the best of his judgment, and to abide by the result 
without repining; the third, to seek happiness in 
limiting the desires, rather than in attempting to 
satisfy them; while the last was to make the search 
after truth the business of his life. 

Descartes, with his brilliant, all-round mind, loved 
to think and feel his mind grow. Although physi- 
cally weak, small and emaciated in appearance, he 
studied his ailments as a true scientist, took care of 
his body, diet and habits of life ; and by the exercise 
and development of his mind he lived to be fifty- 
four years of age. His enjoyment came in knowing 
and in the striving to know. It has been said that 
all men may enjoy, though few can achieve to the 
degree of Descartes. All minds can be made to 
grow to the maximum limit of their innate capabili- 
ties and in the growing bear fruit; but all minds 
cannot give the harvest that Descartes gave the 
world ; and there are very few men with a Descartes 
mind and physical handicaps that would go through 
the life of discipline and thoughtful care that he did, 
in order to give to the world the full measure of his 
mental power. 



1 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 245 

Men are prone, when acknowledging the output 
of a great mind, to speak of his hereditary talents, 
his opportunities, his ease in obtaining wonderful 
results ; they seldom think of the work, the tremen- 
dous self-sacrifices, the devotion to the Cosmic Call, 
the abstinence from so-called worldly pleasure and 
the sublime unselfishness and energetic enthusiasm 
that have been necessary to make powerful the men- 
tal output of such a man. The man playing cards 
or dancing at night and sleeping late, Hves a Hfe 
which, in his opinion, is filled to the brim with duties ; 
the man who works an equal number of hours at his 
vocation, adores his family and loves his fellow men, 
yet makes time to read and study in the evenings 
and early mornings, has plenty of time to prepare 
for opportunities and do things in life that his col- 
leagues attribute to luck; whereas it is entirely due 
to work, efficient planning and the nurturing and 
growth of mental faculties. Stagnant brains will 
always lead to dissatisfaction with oneself and with 
the world. Phable, elastic brains, which have been 
called "flowing brains," see life whole, its opportuni- 
ties and worth-while ideals. 

James Watt (1736-1819), the inventor of the 
modern condensing steam engine, had a versatile, 
well-developed mind. Here is another genius who 
was extremely delicate and in early life was thrown 
on his own resources. He became proficient as a 
surveyor and civil engineer, mechanic, instrument- 
maker and famous as an inventor, mechanical en- 
gineer and scientist. He was also a noted linguist 
and had multitudinous interests. Sir Walter Scott 
speaks of him as "the alert, kind, benevolent old 



246 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

man, his talents and fancies overflowing on every 
subject, with his attention alive to every one's ques- 
tion, his information at every one's command." A 
genius is not a crank, a boresome specialist, an ego- 
istic, unsocial, inhuman prig, but a man in whom re- 
poses, in great measure, universal creative forces, 
which, in their very essence, are humane and God- 
like. Specialization, carried to the utmost hmit of 
human power, results in insanity; mind develop- 
ment, carried to the highest possible degree, mirrors 
the God in man. 

One of the finest and most pathetic characters of 
the Renaissance was Galilei Gahleo (1564-1642), 
the Italian astronomer and experimental philoso- 
pher. Galileo, like most of the brainy men of his 
time, in contrast with the so-called successful men 
of our era, was extremely versatile ; and throughout 
his life was noted for his broad intellectual achieve- 
ments, as well as for his diversified mechanical in- 
ventions. He was a Latin and Greek scholar, logi- 
cian, musician, optician, writer, physician and an 
authority in medicine ; he was also a mathematician 
and possessed much talent as a painter. His father 
tried, without success, to curb his talents and field 
of inquiry and usefulness. He became known as 
"the Archimedes of his day," and his search for 
truth was so displeasing to the church that he was 
menaced with torture, persecuted by the Inquisi- 
tion, incarcerated and condemned as "vehemently 
suspected of heresy." His last days were spent in 
strict seclusion — virtually a prisoner — but his pro- 
digious mental activity continued undiminished to 
the last. 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 247 

Galileo lived to be seventy-eight years of age ; his 
best work was written when he was seventy-two, 
and his last telescopic discovery, — that of the moon's 
diurnal and monthly librations — was made one year 
later, and only a few months before his eyes were 
forever closed in hopeless blindness. Though bhnd, 
he worked incessantly until his death; he thought 
out the apphcation of the pendulum to clock work 
and was engaged in dictating to his disciples, Viviani 
and Torricelli, his ideas on the theories of impact, 
when he was seized with the fever that brought him 
to the grave. 

Man's body reaches its prime in early life and 
degeneration soon sets in; but man's mind, if nur- 
tured, developed and exercised, never grows old; 
although those parts of it that are abused by neg- 
lect, atrophy early in life. The "second childhood" 
mind is an unused, undeveloped mind that has not 
been properly strengthened by usage. Much of the 
truly great and immortal mental work of the world 
has been performed by middle-aged and old men, 
just as the great physical records, requiring mus- 
cle, endurance and brawn, have been generally 
made by young men in their third decade of life. 
But all the brilliant mental efforts that have left 
their imprint on the world have not been the product 
of experienced minds developed by age. The 
modern creed that no man should write until he is 
forty is absurd. This is as preposterous as the 
Osier statement that a man at forty is useless to 
the world and could profitably be dispensed with. 
There is a great deal of truth in the old adage, 
"Young men for action, old men for counsel," yet 



248 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

it is interesting to note that Berkeley ^vrote his 
great work when only twenty-five years of age; 
Hume's masterpiece was written when he was 
twenty-seven; Shelling received the ^Master's De- 
gree from the University of Tubingen when seven- 
teen years old and at twenty-three was Professor 
of Philosophy at Jena. The brilliant Keats died 
at twenty-five ; Novalis, the great mystic, at twenty- 
eight; Marlowe at twenty-seven; Shelley at thirty 
and Christ at thirty-three. 

Youth should be naturally spontaneous, instinc- 
tive, ebullient, craving freedom and action. "Reflec- 
tion whispers to the grov^dng man," and expe- 
rience generally tends to soften, subdue and give 
deeper and more universal social vision. Youth is 
apt to be impetuous, extreme and, in conflict with 
error, grow easily discouraged and pessimistic. Age 
gives deeper thought and understanding; it is more 
indulgent, more tolerant, but grows T\dth all its 
mello^vness more alHed with the world forces of 
truth and love. 

Men with brains formed of normal nervous mat- 
ter and of average physical "goodness," should 
never mentally degenerate even in extreme old age. 
IMany men have done brilliant work when eighty 
and ninety years of age — splendid brains in weak- 
ened bodies ; but the brain of the average man and 
woman weakens as age advances; the atrophy that 
has been steadily occurring through disuse since 
childhood becoming painfully evident at a period of 
life when the brain should be developing to its great- 
est power. Thoreau, discussing this tragic fact, 
said, "We are accustomed to say in New England 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 249 

that fewer and fewer pigeons visit us every year. 
Our forests furnish no masts for them. So it would 
seem fewer and fewer thoughts visit each growing 
man from year to year, for the grove in our minds 
is laid waste — sold to feed unnecessary fires of 
ambition, or sent to mill and there is scarcely a twig 
left for them to perch on." The timber of the 
average mature man's brain has not been merchan- 
dised, however ; it has become dead through dry rot. 
Education and mind development should cover the 
whole of life and we should be as active in mind 
culture in ripe old age as we are in our youth. We 
speak pityingly of a man whose early education 
has been neglected, but we ignore the fact that we 
are neglecting the far greater and, in some respects, 
more important opportunities of what should be 
our later and more mature education. 

Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, who shares with 
Darwin in the discovery of the law of natural selec- 
tion and the survival of the fittest, wrote his great 
book, "Social Environment and Moral Progress," 
in his ninety-first year. Wallace was a born natur- 
alist and he has put humanity and soul into mater- 
iahstic conceptions of nature — a kindly old man, 
scientific, yet loving and lovable; a true reformer, 
working for his fellow men with a mind great 
enough to encompass all that lies between the hori- 
zons of human thought and activity. Surely the 
mind of a good man, if well developed, does not 
decay and shrivel up with the body tissues. "He has 
been inspired with the belief that life is a great and 
noble calling, not a mean and groveling thing that 



250 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated 
and lofty destiny." 

Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, hved to be 
eighty- four years of age and it has been said that 
"a summary of so versatile a genius is impossible." 
His intellect was enormously energetic, with a most 
diversified field, directed generally to practical ends. 
He was a diplomat, statesman, writer, scientist and 
economist. In politics, religion, science, ethics, 
agriculture, navigation, hygiene, journalism, print- 
ing, publishing, mechanical arts, music and educa- 
tion, he seemed almost equally at home; and every 
subject seemed to come from under his touch, sim- 
plified and enlarged. It is said that "He renewed 
everything he touched," and that "He had, per- 
haps, the most clarifying and renovating intellect 
of his keenly alert age, and to know his writings 
is to be familiar with half of the activities of the 
eighteenth century." Like his contemporary, the 
brilHant mental free-lance, Voltaire, his personaHty 
was greater than any separate production of his 
brain. These were great men in supreme versatihty 
of mind, in dominion over the world and in power 
of expression, but in the case of Franklin the ex- 
pressive power was the more practical and his 
achievements were epoch-making in Hnes of accom- 
plishment for the immediate benefit of mankind. 

As a scientist and inventor, Franklin was decried 
by his contemporaries as an amateur and a dabbler. 
The age of "specialists" was at hand and this ver- 
satile man, with a developed, active brain, who de- 
voted some of his "leisure" hours to scientific re- 
search, was too great to be a specialist; yet his fa- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 251 

mous experiments with the kite proved Hghtning to 
be an electrical phenomenon. He overthrew en- 
tirely the "friction" theory of electricity and upset, 
one by one, the theories of the "specialists" of his 
day. His last public act was in the interest of the 
abolition of slavery and, to the end, his mind re- 
mained brilliant and his personality was marked 
by a fine serenity and calm. 

Goethe, "a clear and universal man," was a poet, 
philosopher, statesman, scientist, man of letters and, 
in wisdom, was like Shakespeare, an epitome of the 
world. Carlyle said that Goethe was an artist in 
the high and ancient meaning of the term, and "we 
trace in the creations of this man touches of that 
old divine spirit." He was, it has been said, "what 
philosophy can truly call a man." Kings and peas- 
ants, "the callow dilettante and inamorato to the 
grave transcendental philosopher," have studied 
Goethe's writings with affection and with a faith 
which, "where it cannot unriddle, learns to trust." 
Goethe was thorough and industrious. Novalis 
said of him that the grand law of his being was his 
determination to conclude whatever he undertook; 
"let him engage in any task, no matter what its diffi- 
culties or how small its worth, he cannot quit it 
until he has mastered its whole secret, finished it, 
and made the result of it his own." 

Goethe's life was a life of effort. He said of 
himself that he had "struggled toughly." He is a 
splendid illustration of the theory that much which 
is admitted as genius is born of effort and untiring, 
persistent industry. Goethe was a true poet, a 
master of humanity and, therefore, a citizen, not 



252 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

only of his own country, but of the world ; not only 
of his own time, but of all time. He had the wis- 
dom of experience obtained by observation, atten- 
tion, reason and reflection, the whole being leavened 
by intuition. His brilliant mind raised him from 
youthful pessimism, denial and despair to "that 
better vision, not tolerable only, but full of solem- 
nity and loveliness." 

Goethe was analytical, scientific, versatile, logical 
and shrewd, yet human, devout, joyous and sympa- 
thetic. When he passed away, one of the famous 
critical writers of his day wrote, "That worthy 
prince, exemplary in whatever concerned hterature 
and the arts, has been called suddenly away." Ver- 
satility is generally the condition of genius. In 
Goethe, we find an all-roundness, allied with super- 
human industry, clear vision, clean-cut ideals and 
extraordinary common sense. The biography of 
achievement is most often the biography of men 
thoroughly alive on many sides of their nature and 
of men taking an active part and expressing unusual 
versatility in the drama of the world. 

The German Philosopher Leibnitz was so ver- 
satile that his contemporaries referred to him as the 
man "with a universal mind." This great optimist 
was an historian, naturalist, diplomatist, theologian, 
mathematician, politician, scholar and philosopher. 

Immanuel Kant was not only the greatest phi- 
losopher of his time, but he lived a life devoted to 
science and taught logic, ethics, metaphysics, mathe- 
matics, cosmography and geography at the Uni- 
versity of Konigsberg. 

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was the son of a 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 253 

French tanner ; he had difficulty in acquiring learn- 
ing, and in chemistry was considered very mediocre 
and even stupid at school. Yet this man worked 
to be of service in the world along specific lines 
which he mapped out for himself and for which edu- 
cational authorities said he was not fitted. He 
rescued the milk industry from an epidemic of fatal 
character, made many foods and beverages safe for 
consumption after long periods of storage — an in- 
evitable condition in those days of slow transit. He 
discovered the process which we now know as Pas- 
teurization, which saves hundreds of thousands of 
young lives each year; he revolutionized surgical 
practice and conquered incurable diseases. 

Madison C. Peters has said, "Our country is full 
of persons who can do many things fairly well, but 
too few who know how to do one thing supremely 
well." If he had said that the world contains many 
people who can do one thing fairly well, and but 
few who can do anything supremely well, he would 
have been right. Again he says, "Every man who 
would be successful must specialize, know one thing 
clear through. The day of universal knowledge is 
past. The true measure of a successful man's 
learning today is the number of studies which he 
elects to let alone ; — to keep a gun from scattering, 
put in a single shot. No man can know one thing, 
or anything, clear through." The day of universal 
knowledge cannot be past; it has not arrived, and 
it is so far in the future that we cannot see it, but 
we are working toward it. It is the goal of a work- 
ing, struggling humanity, and when we reach it, 
we shall all be gods. 



254 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

The true measure of a man's success is his breadth 
of interests, his nearness to Godhood. A single shot 
is used in a well educated man's gun as well as in 
that of the modern speciahst's, but whereas the lat- 
ter keeps aiming at a single point on a single target, 
the former has a wide and deep angle of fire and, 
with rapid and intelligent manipulation, may score 
ten times as many real hits in the battle of life as 
the speciaHst with the fixed gun and generally 
deadened universal interests. A man who works 
solely to make money is a speciaUst; a man who 
works solely for fame or notoriety is a specialist, 
just as much as a man who builds gas engines and 
indignantly refuses to become interested in any 
other phase of engineering or of life, affirming that 
"absolute concentration of both mind and energy 
in one chosen pursuit is essential for success." 

Peters has referred to Lord Brougham's versatile 
career and said that this wonderful man, in a career 
of upwards of sixty years, covered law, hterature, 
pohtics and science, in all of which he achieved dis- 
tinction. One of Brougham's friends, when re- 
quested to undertake some new work, excused him- 
self on the ground that he "had no time," but added, 
"Go with it to that fellow Brougham; he has time 
for everything." Peters admires Brougham's in- 
defatigable industry and says that the man knew 
how to work and never left a moment unemployed ; 
"no amount of application was too great for him, 
and it was said of him that if his life station had 
been only that of a shoe-black, he would never have 
rested satisfied until he had become the best shoe- 
black in England." Peters denounces versatility 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 255 

and greatly esteems industry; but industry in the 
case of Brougham, and in the majority of world- 
famous geniuses, resulted in versatility. One can- 
not consistently praise and advocate the road and 
denounce the goal. 

Industry, coupled with humanity and expanding 
into universahsm, will make good specialists with 
wide interests and sympathies ; and if a man is fa- 
vored by nature with many talents, he may become 
more of a specialist in many other branches of 
knowledge than a so-called trained specialist, who, 
by applying himself to his one vocation to make 
money, does not put half as much intelligence, 
energy, and love into the subject as a versatile 
genius who considers it merely one of a large num- 
ber of subjects in which he is intensely interested. 
Gerald Stanley Lee has well said, "It is as good a 
principle in industry and in mechanics as it is in 
law, medicine, the arts, and biology, that specializa- 
tion is a source of weakness as well as strength." 
The real work of the world is done by men who 
would generally be considered to "have no time," 
but who are so efficient in the planning and using 
of their time that they seem, in some miraculous 
way, to obtain ample time to do that which their 
heart desires. 

In the business world, the "big" man of great 
and diversified interests, going through a staggering 
amount of work each day, has time to speak with 
an unimportant caller; but the "little" man, who is 
not actuated by an industrious genius, makes ten 
times as much fuss as the "big" man and does a 
tenth as much work; he keeps everybody around 



256 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

him inefficient and in a turmoil and he can only be 
seen by "important" business visitors. It is a well- 
known fact that the busiest people have the most 
time and the reason is that they have clear and 
definite aims which they constantly serve; they are 
efficient in the utihzation of time and in the ex- 
penditure of energy. If a man is industrious, with 
human sympathies and understanding, he will be 
versatile, and the degree of his versatility will be an 
index of his completeness. Schiller believed that 
to be able and successful, one should "man his own 
heart," or use every part of his brain and express 
his humanity and talents in their fullness. 

Wagner (1813-1883) is typical of the geniuses 
who grew to immortality by work, suffering and 
antagonism. He developed into a versatile artist, 
a musician, dramatic composer, poet, writer and 
Hnguist. The man who works is the one who 
achieves. The spur of necessity has often forced 
men to do their best and accomplish much when 
their deepest interests were aroused; but the joy of 
work has made many, whose vocations have given 
them a comfortable living, struggle to know more of 
the universe in their "margin of time." And thus 
searchers after truth have appeared in the world 
who have worked, not only for food, shelter and 
raiment, but for the very joy of the working and 
the inner satisfaction which blooms from mental 
growth. Carlyle said that for suffering and endur- 
ing there is no remedy but striving and doing. 
Franklin was right when he proclaimed that "The 
highest worship of God lies in service to man." To 
be of service to man, however, one must know one- 



MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 257 

self intimately ; this brings more than knowledge — 
when realized, it is wisdom. 

"I sought for God, 

But God eluded me. 
I sought my brother, 

But I found him not. 
I found myself. 

And, finding, found all three." 

To have much purpose and energetic enthusiasm, 
to achieve with little inherent talent, is far better 
than much talent and little purpose; but energy 
commensurate with talent, enthusiastically urging 
the growth and development of every useful attri- 
bute, expresses mental life, sanity and individualis- 
tic efficiency. More nervous energy than gray 
matter is like a powerful engine in a full bowed 
boat — the power expends itself in idly churning the 
water instead of driving the boat ahead. 

Our duty is to develop and shape our minds to 
the absolute limit of hereditary power and thus put 
to useful work the human energy and power which 
our physical bodies generate. Specialization is 
admirable and generally necessary for further prog- 
ress. As knowledge increases and becomes more 
complex, human minds are compelled to make 
deeper studies of certain subjects to reach the ap- 
proximate limit of human knowledge ; but we make 
a great mistake today in believing that in being a 
speciahst one must be an exclusionist. To give pri- 
ority to a subject does not require the ignoring of 
other fields of human inquiry ; and the man w4io can 
work and be intensely interested in more than one 
field, generally makes the best legitimate specialist, 



2,58 MENTALITY AND FREEDOM 

leading his colleagues along the road to greater and 
still greater achievement. 

Every man should cultivate all his faculties. He 
must either use them or lose them. Every day and 
every hour brings opportunities for self -develop- 
ment and world-service. Carlyle has told us that 
every day born into the world comes like a burst of 
music and sings itself all day through, and we will 
make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march. Every 
situation occupied by man has its ideal, its duty. 
"Yes, here in this poor, hampered, despicable actual, 
wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is 
the ideal! Work it out therefrom and, working, 
believe, live, and be free!" 



"The instruction we find in books is like fire. We 
fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, commu- 
nicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all." 

— Voltaire. 

To the writers of all time, from whose works 
I have drawn in the preparation of this volume, 
I acknowledge my indebtedness. 

W. A. F. 



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